We prefer not to make purely cross-sectional comparisons, but this claim is simply not true. The data below looks at the period of time from the beginning of the Obama administration in January 2009 until the end of 2015. Mass public shootings – defined as four or more people killed in a public place, and not in the course of committing another crime, and not involving struggles over sovereignty. The focus on excluding shootings that do not involve other crimes (e.g., gang fights or robberies) has been used from the original research by Lott and Landes to more recently the FBI. We cover the period from the beginning of the Obama administration to the current date, from 2009 to the Charleston massacre (this matches the starting period for another recent study we did on US shootings and we chose that because that was the starting point that Bloomberg’s group had picked). The cases were complied doing a news search. The starting year was picked simply because Obama was making this claim and 2009 was the beginning of the Obama administration. It also matched the time frame of a recent Bloomberg report (a report that we evaluated here). (The federal government recently changed the FBI definition to 3 or more from the traditional 4 or more definition that had been in place for decades, but because the Bloomberg report, most academics, and all our data is in terms of four or more we will continue to use the traditional definition.) A comparison across the entire world from 1970 to today is available here.

Some people have defended President Obama’s statement by pointing to the word “frequency.” But, even if one puts it in terms of frequency, the president’s statement is still false, with the US ranking 12th compared to European countries.

Click on Tables to Enlarge

The average incident rate for the 28 EU countries is 0.0602 with a 95% confidence Interval of .0257 to .09477. The US rate is 0.078 is higher than the EU rate, but US and the average for EU countries are not statistically different. The average fatality rate for the 28 EU countries is 0.114 with a 95% confidence Interval of -.0244 to .253. The US rate is 0.089 is lower than the EU rate, but they are again not statistically significantly different.

There were 27% more casualties per capita from mass public shootings in EU than US from 2009-15

The CPRC has also collected data on the worst mass public shootings, those cases where at least 15 people were killed in the attack.

There were 16 cases where at least 15 people were killed. Out of those cases, four were in the United States, two in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom.

But the U.S. has a population four times greater than Germany’s and five times the U.K.’s, so on a per-capita basis the U.S. ranks low in comparison — actually, those two countries would have had a frequency of attacks 1.96 (Germany) and 2.46 (UK) times higher.

Small countries such as Norway, Israel and Australia may have only one major attack each, one-fourth of what the U.S. has suffered, but the US population is vastly greater. If they suffered attacks at a rate adjusted for their population, Norway, Israel and Australia would have had attacks that were respectively 16, 11, and 3 times greater than the US.

There is also the issue of what President Obama meant by “mass violence.” If you include bombings, many countries face many more bombings than the US does. On March 22nd, 2016, Belgium had a bombing attacks at an airport and subway that killed 31 people and wounded 180. That is worse than any mass public shooting in the US in terms of fatalities and woundings. Or take just the bombing cases in Russia. Russia had few mass public shootings, but it suffered from numerous bomb attacks, with 1.31 mass bombing murders per million people.

— There is no evidence that 90% of Americans supported the reforms that Obama was pushing. It is true that 80% to 90% of Americans say that they support background checks on “all gun buyers” (see also here and here), but that is not the same as saying that they supported universal background checks and it is not the same thing as them saying that they supported the law that Obama wanted. When asked this question people may be thinking of guns being purchased at a store and possibly a gun show, but it isn’t at all clear that they are talking about a transfer between friends (either a gift or a sale) and it is very doubtful that they are referring to transfers between family members. Surveys that specifically address the background check bill before the Senate in 2013 do not show overwhelming support. The most support that I can find for such a bill was in Washington State where initiative 594 was passed with 59% support, not 90%, and it had spending that out did the initiative’s opponents by about 33-to-1.

— None of the laws that Obama has put forward would have had any impact on either Newtown or Charleston. The Charleston killer apparently did pass a background check, and, in any case, he obtained his gun by stealing it from his Mom.

The best proxy for “industrialized countries” is the membership of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. There are currently 34 countries in the OECD, but the agency also includes Brazil and Russia in its statistical data. (The two countries have been negotiating for membership but talks have been suspended with Russia because of the Crimea crisis.)

The OECD says the average homicide rate among the 36 countries is 4.1 per 100,000 people.

According to the 2014 data, at the top of the list is Brazil, with a homicide rate 25.5, or six times the average. Next on the list is Mexico, with a homicide rate of 23.4, followed by Russia at 12.8.

Then comes a tie for fourth place—Chile and the United States both have a homicide rate of 5.2. Estonia follows close behind with a homicide rate of 4.7. . . .

The bigger question is the one of causation that President Obama keeps pushing and the evidence on that can be found here and here. His claim on that is also clearly wrong.

UPDATED: here is a comparison that breaks down these rates by US states and European countries.

UPDATE: Politifact has discussion on fatality rates from mass public shootings, where they rank the US as the fourth highest country. Their analysis looks at data from 2000 to 2014, but it is clear that their analysis is flawed. They have a much broader definition of these attacks where they included cases where no one was killed. Still they are missing a large number of cases in foreign countries, even when one is looking cases where 4 or more people were killed.

For example for France, they claim that from 2000 to 2014 there is only one such shooting and eight people were killed in that case. They missed at least 16 deaths in just cases where four or more people have been killed. We have also added in a few cases prior to 2000. However, we do not believe that we have obtained more than a fraction of the mass public shootings in Europe prior to 2009.

Trèbes, France, March 23, 2018: A gunman affiliated with ISIS arrived in Trèbes and shot at a group of police officers who were jogging. Then, he attacked a supermarket, where three people were killed and others were injured. A total of four were killed and 15 wounded. He had originally stolen a car in Carcassonne where he killed the car’s passenger and wounded the driver.

There are also other attacks in France that met their criteria, but we would not normally collect (more cases here)

Cologne, Germany, September 5, 1977: The Red Army Faction killed five people when they attacked a chauffeured car carrying Hanns Martin Schleyer, then president of the German employers’ association, in Cologne. Four masked RAF members sprayed bullets into the two vehicles, killing Marcisz and a police officer, Roland Pieler. The driver of the police escort vehicle, Reinhold Brändle, and a third police officer, Helmut Ulmer, were also killed.

Berlin, Germany, September 17, 1992: 4 killed, one wounded. Masked gunmen burst into a Berlin restaurant late on a Thursday night and killed four men, including a leading Kurdish politician from Iran.

Zarautz, Spain, November 3, 1980: 5 killed and 5 wounded. Base separatists killed traffic department workers who were drinking at a bar in the town. Arguably shouldn’t be included because it may be involving struggles over sovereignty.

Tatarstan, hunting camp, April 26, 1992: 9 killed and 1 wounded. The 1992 Tatarstan shooting was a mass murder. On 26 April 1992, 23-year-old Andrey Shpagonov, former huntsman went to a hunting camp. He went to steal firearms.

Yaroslavsky, Primorsky Krai, August 25, 2002: 5 killed and 10 wounded. The Yaroslavsky shooting was a mass murder that occurred in Yaroslavsky, Primorsky Krai, Russia on August 25, 2002, when 40-year-old police captain Sergey Semidovskiy (Russian: Сергей Семидовский) killed five people and wounded ten others in and outside a bar with a Saiga carbine, after an argument with several customers.

Kizlyar, Republic of Dagestan, February 18, 2018: “Five women were killed and several others were injured after a gunman opened fire with a hunting rifle on people leaving a church service in Russia’s Dagestan region on Sunday, Russian media outlets reported.”

Punjab, India, July 23, 2015: Islamic terrorists killed 7 people and wounded at least 15 others. Other Indian cases may be found here.

For Nigeria

Osun State, Nigeria, Saturday, July 10, 1999: The Black Axe Confraternity attacked students at the Obafemi Awolowo University and killing five people and injuring of eleven.

Mamudo, Yobe State, Nigeria, July 6, 2013: Islamic group Boko Haram killed 42 children and teachers at a boarding school.

Gujba, Yobe State, Nigeria, September 29, 2013: gunmen from the Islamic group Boko Haram entered the male dormitory in the College of Agriculture and killed “as many as 50 dead.” Most of the dead were Muslim college students.

Yobe State, Nigeria, February 25, 2014: 59 boys were killed at the Federal Government College of Buni Yadi. The boys were separated from the girls and the young girls were told to get married at a very early age.

Ipil, Philippines, April 3, 1995: The Islamic Command Council fired on residents and took hostages. 53 civilians killed. Not clear that this should be classified with the other cases because much of the attack involved robbing of eight banks.

Maguindanao, Mindanao, Philippines, November 23, 2009: Andal Ampatuan, Jr. and his clan (a “leading Muslim political clan“) attacked Esmael Mangudadatu’s family members and supporters, and accompanying journalists. 57 killed (34 were journalists) and at least 4 wounded. The victims were on their way to file a certificate of candidacy for Esmael Mangudadatu, vice mayor of Buluan town, they were kidnapped and killed.

Digos, Davao Del Sur, Philippines, June 25, 1989: 39 people, many of them children, were mercilessly gunned-down by the communist New People’s Army (CPP-NPA) rebels while they were attending a Sunday mass. This appears to be a battle over sovereignty.

For Azerbaijan

Baku, Azerbaijan, April 30, 2009: Farda Gadirov shot to death 12 people (students and staff) at the Azerbaijan State Oil Academy

For Brazil

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, April 7, 2011: Wellington Menezes de Oliveira shot to death 12 children between the ages of 12 and 14 at the Tasso da Silveira Municipal School

For Israel

Tel Aviv, Israel, June 7, 2016: Two attackers were both dressed as Orthodox Jews started shooting at around 10 p.m. local time in an upscale area of cafes and restaurants near the central military headquarters and Defense Ministry compound. At least 4 died.

Dear Bartosh:
A lot of US states have only had one shooting, for example, see the Newtown shooting in Connecticut. Should the Newtown shooting be removed? Many US states haven’t had any attacks. The point here is that there are lots of Europe experiences all sorts of attacks, but people treat each country’s attack as an aberration since they don’t have a large number in any one country.

Umm, gun laws are drastically different state by state in the US so your argument that it should be based on gun laws and thier effectiveness points to comparing a state in the US vs a country in Europe.

A lot of European countries are smaller than the states in the US? That doesn’t seem like a valid argument to me. How’s that? E.G. The Sahara is bigger than some US states, yet no mass murders over there. See my point?

The only way to compare ‘how bad’ things are is to consider population. Population density should surely be considered too.

The numbers were compiled in per millions of people, ie the numbers were crunched down to basic form to take away the difference in populations. the 2.044 number for Norway, .044 of a person got shot? No. learn how actual math and statistics work.

You are right in saying that Norway cannot be compared to the US, but it has nothing to do with population size.

In reality, NO other country can be compared to the US because there are cultures that are unique to America that do not exist in other countries which interact with gun ownership and attitudes towards guns. For example, try talking about the history of America without making any mention of guns. I dare anyone to try without eventually failing.

Guns are as much a part of American folklore and culture as are cowboys and apple pie. But, here’s the kicker:

No other country on Earth has God-given human rights codified in its founding documents wherein one of them specifically spells out the importance and immutability of private gun ownership.

There, in a nutshell, is why you cannot compare the US with any other nation

Holy Crap. 50% of one population does something and 40% of another population does the same thing. IT DOES NOT MATTER WHAT THEIR POPULATIONS ARE!!!
Go back to middle school and have a teacher explain that to you if you can’t comprehend that.

U.S. states are countries. Each one is independent from the other. The United States is an independent nation only as it relates to non-American states. Domestically, each state is sovereign in its affairs, which includes gun laws.

By that logic we should be looking at the EU and ignoring individual nations. The US is a federation of 50 republics, 176 tribal nations and a councillor city state (serving as a neutral capital for the federation). Each state and tribal nation has it’s own laws, government, tax collection and military (though most tribal nations are demilitarized). Comparing European nations to states is FAR more appropriate than comparing them to the entire US. It should be noted that the same applies to Mexico.

The population of Europe is estimated to be approximately 741M in 2015 by UN estimate. The US is big, but population in Europe is remarkably dense.
For just the EU states, Eurostat has the January 2017 population at 511M, still significantly more than the US.

I agree that we should be comparing per capita. The point is better made with better numbers

Norway is smaller than many of our states. It would be a far fairer comparison to compare state by state with Norway and all other European countries. You’d find out quickly how much safer most US states are compared to European countries.

It was proven to be false? Can you back that up with some credible sources? I have heard of and read some conspiracy theories but there was nothing that had my jaw drop in regard to this shocking revelation you are referring to.

*Law abiding citizens do not commit intentional homicides, nor do the guns in their possession*

Are you referring to President Obama’s claim being proven false? If so, each of the mass shootings in Europe are listed for you. You can do a news search to verify whether those are real cases. Is there something else that you are looking for? Please let us know. Thanks.

James Herriot, the notion that Sandy Hook is a made up attack is repulsive, counter productive, and bizarre.

Anyone who promotes this disgusting and baseless story is adding more suffering to the families of those children. Stop repeating halfassed conspiracy nonsense. If you REALLY believe it go to Sandy Hook and confront some of the parents (make sure your life insurance is paid up).

Hey! Excellent job standing on the graves of innocent children to promote your political agenda! Is it really that hard to imagine that people you disagree with politically don’t want to see children die either? Huh? I guess you never thought of that did you? Well anyways, enjoy your day. Oh, and when your feet get tired from standing on those deceased kids don’t expect me to pull up a chair.

And the point is what exactly? The numbers break down the results for both individual countries and for the EU as a whole. One reason for looking at the EU as a whole is that the EU’s population is closer to that for the US.

Why should Norway be ignored? Obama claimed: “this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.” Norway, with the worst mass public shooting, surely is something that has to be noted. Do you disagree that it is relevant for Obama’s claim? With just over five million people, Norway isn’t a large country, but I explicitly talk about the small population and I have adjusted for differences in population. In any case, if you remove Norway from the list, the US is still ranked 7th. I have also only included Europe. Obama’s claim gets even less believable if you include a lot of countries outside of Europe. In addition, I only included a limited type of mass public shooting when evaluating Obama’s claim about “mass violence.” As noted in the New York Daily News piece, there are many types of mass public shootings that I didn’t occur. I also didn’t include other types of mass violence, such as bombings.

True. Norway’s attack was the worst such shooting in history, and yet Norway, in many respects, is a model of proposed gun laws. It does have a very high ownership rate, but the laws are stricter than in the US.

The shooter did not use an ‘assault weapon’. In fact, his rifle would have been on Diane Feinstein’s ‘sporting use exemption’ list for the assault weapons ban. Would that law have stopped the shooting? Of course not.

And just to respond to Piers Morgan’s comments a while ago, he said how the UK suffered a mass shooting, banned guns, and has not seen one since. Well, I posit that Norway had an even worse mass shooting, did NOT change its gun laws, and has ALSO not had one since.

It would be nice to see a comparison of all the mentioned European countries combined put up against the U.S. as a whole. This would take away the skew of small countries and account for higher population countries with a smaller frequency than the U.S. i.e. Germany, France, England, Italy. It would be a fair comparison to account for large outliers like Norway the same as outlying states in the U.S. that have no occurrences.

Typically statistical data is referenced as number of incidences per capita…in other words, the number of incidences per 100,000 people.

When doing a statistical analysis using a per capita basis, you eliminate, or at least greatly reduce, any skewing which may occur because a given country has a much lower population than another country in the same comparison.

A couple of years ago, there was a comparison study done between the US and Great Britain in regards to violent crime. This study showed that in 2010 the US had approximately 450 violent crimes per 100,000 people and, during the same year, Great Britain experienced approximately 2050 violent crimes per 100,000 people.

By using the same number, you establish a common denominator which is completely independent from the total population of a country. This allows one to compare apples to apples.

The data is there, really, if you look at the tables and look up population statistics.

The population of Europe (the continent, not just the E.U.) is rougly 2,3 times the size of the U. S. population. The total number of shootings from Jan 2009 to Dec 2015 was 25 in Europe (343 fatalities) and 25 in the US (199 fatalities).

The homicide rate graph tells the story. Yes since Norway has a small population it makes it skewed as well as if you survive the shooting it does not count on the first grqph. Yet we choose to ignore the homicide rate which we far out score norway. Cherry picking data aren’t we.

To Mr Lott. There are 320 million people in the US, and about 5 million in Finland, so that means 64 times the population. Still, 385 mass shootings in USA 2016, 333 in 2015 and do I need to say more?

By the way, 2015 and 2016 ZERO (0) mass shootings in Finland (and in Norway presumably)

It just seems so hard for you to admit that US is a country full of gun-violence and every single statistic proves that. To even compare a country like Norway to US makes your position as a some kind of researcher amaze me..

2015 total of 70 people were murdered in Finland (by all means/weapons). 8194 killed in USA by firearm.(FBI stat) That is 117 times more GUN related murders than ALL murders in Finland. Come visit Europe some day..

Why do you have to look at the mass shootings to try and prove your (inaccurate) point? You take the one guy from Norway with a mental health problem who goes amok (first time in 70 years) and compare that to US that has a CULTURE of violence and gun crimes. Does this really work to your readers?

Dear Teemo:
I am not sure that I understand your point. Are you saying that you want to compare a country with 4 million people in terms of the number of attacks to another country with 320 million? Don’t you expect that the number will be lower simply because of the larger population? How else would you make the two countries comparable?

I’m sure the Brevik shooting alters the stats on number of people killed, since he managed to kill quite a few people. But Norway also outranks the US in frequency of attacks, and that would not be altered by the number of people killed by Brevik. Also, the fact that Norway suffered an unusually bad attack doesn’t change the fact that other countries on that list also outrank the US.

I think, like was stated earlier, population density can play a big part as well. Norway has a much smaller population for sure, but the population density is over twice that of the United States per square mile, and it’s about the size of California, slightly smaller. Bad country to use as a comparison due to vast difference in population structure.

Brianna wrote: “But Norway also outranks the US in frequency of attacks, and that would not be altered by the number of people killed by Brevik.”

You’re quite right. One in Five Million is more than 38 in 320 Million.

Lets check frequency again, just to show you a more intelligent point to that:
Norway: ONE mass shooting / mass murder between May 8th 1945 and June 15th 2016 (End of WWII in Norway till today’s date)
USA: 164 mass shootings….. so far in 2016 alone….

Norway have restrictive gun laws, and they require ACTIVE membership in a gun club. Norway rank at #10 on Guns pr Capita with just over 3 firearms per 10 citizens. Guns are registered, quickly reported to the goverment if stolen and very few weapons are unaccounted for. If someone, for some reason, is deemed unfit to own weapons (mental unstability, serious violent or gun related crimes etc.) the weapons are confiscated.

Reading the comments, it seems you guys in the US are in such denial. I think its a mix of your culture (gun culture) NRA propaganda and disbelief. The frequency of gun related death in the US is just crazy for US (europeans). Moreover the idea that guns are actually saving people or would help do so is even more crazy. For exemple in France, we do have hunters, policemen… But gun laws are strict. And do you know where you find the most gun related death ? In the hunting community ! How strange ! There’s 2 answer : either poor gun controls and lots of guns availlable leads to much more gun death and massacre OR there are much much more evil people in the US. Go figure. I would totally understand that you understand those facts, but given the choice you want to keep your freedom to own guns while being OK with the murder rate. But please, stop denying reality !

With respect to what few facts you site within that sea of ad hominems: As of 2014, France had an intentional homicide rate of 1.2 per 100,000 people. The USA as of 2014 had a rate of 4.7 per 100,000, of which approximately 2/3 (3.13 per 100k) are by firearm and 1/3 (1.57 per 100k) are by means other than firearm. So, to your question about whether Americans are more murderous (or evil as you put it) than the French, the answer is, by that measure, yes. The NON-firearm murder rate in the USA is higher than the entire murder rate by all methods, including firearms, in France. If by some magic, all firearms were eliminated in the USA and there were, through even more impossible voodoo, no murders by firearm whatsoever is the USA, the remaining non-firearm rate of murder in the USA would still be higher than the overall murder rate in France. Not only that, one would expect that if firearms were not available for murder the USA, murderers would substitute other means, and the non-firearm murder rate would be even higher than it is with guns available. I don’t know the why Americans are, on average, so much more murderous than the French, but it does not appear to have anything to do with the prevalence of firearms. As Lott pointed out, raw comparison of crime rates between different countries based on the single variable of gun ownership are statistically illiterate. I may be in a state of denial, but those who make such comparisons are most certainly in a state of ignorance.

These statistics are a bit stilted. Anything to try to make the USA look like there are not serious issues with the love of guns and ignoring the number of mass shootings. And to say it is better to do nothing at all is very irresponsible. I can only see our society in grave times.

Your statement is a bit stilted… Anything to justify the banning of guns because of insane people who are glorified/magnified by the press to make the situation look as bad as possible. To say that we must do something without specifying a remedy that would actually prevent attacks by the insane is very irresponsible.

I disagree. You claim they’re stilted only because you want them to be stilted. It’s obvious you don’t support gun ownership just by reading the little bit you posted. Look at the data for what it is and not for what you want it to be and you might be able to better trust it. These stats are far better than relying on the POTUS’s address claiming the US had the worst gun homicide rate without providing background facts. These stats provide background information. It’s better to do nothing at all if you’ve no hard facts to make a decision on, IMO, especially when it applies to our inborn rights (such as the 2nd amendment).

These stats are about as transparent as you’ll get…you certainly won’t see such transparency from the US government.

Why don’t we compare drive by shootings with mass shootings? You liberals want to prove how evil the big bad gun owner is, while maintaining it is the evil white Christian republican doing the shooting. Lets be fair in that? No? Figures…

And for the record, we are in grave times. People are currently buying guns for protection left and right, including liberals. We of course can’t use them for protection without the left labeling us evil racist murderous gun nuts.

By stilted, you mean slanted? If you have a better take on the data, you should express it, rather than toss out a series of ad hominems and hand wringing. Gun owners don’t have less of a regard for human life, nor do they, for the most part, say that we should “do nothing” about homicide and other violent crime. But I, for one, expect that proposed gun control laws (or any laws for that matter) show some evidence of efficacy by actually reducing homicides and violent crime. So far, throughout all the hundreds of “common sense” gun control measure passed at the federal and state level over the decades, no such evidence has emerged from the crime statistics. Apparently, common sense doesn’t include considerations of whether gun control laws will provide any benefit other than empty symbolism.

I absolutely agree. There was one really major shooting in Norway in 2011 where 77 people were killed. Combine that with a national population of around 5 million people, and look at my graphy! The evil socialist nations of Scandanavia have more mass shooting than we do in the United States!

Norway should not be excluded but they should compare Europe with the USA, not small individual countries, this is just distorting reality with clever use of statistics. Their stats shows 7 small countries in Europe above the USA but there are over 50 countries in Europe, so that’s some nice cherry picking they do.
The second graph, they do the same, I doubt anyone would call countries like Brazil, Russia, China and Mexico “developed” in the sense the USA , Germany and Sweden are. From all the western countries the USA has by far the highest homicide rate.

Obama was the one who compared the USA to “other countries”. Now you object to statistics comparing the USA to those other countries. Based on that, I would say that at least we agree on one point: Obama is full of baloney.

That’s why it’s per capita. Per Capita makes sure you compare apples to apples. If you have something that happens 1 per 1 million people, then you can expect in a state or country of 1 million people, it’ll likely happen 1 time. if you have a state or country of 1 billion people, you’d expect it to happen 1000s. if you have 350 million people it would happen 350 times.

So to exclude a small nation just because they only have 1 incident is wrong or at least in accurate. Now there is something to be said for removing outliers. Usually the biggest and smallest could be legitimately removed to prevent the average from being skewed too far. However, that’s also why you calculate the median. You can also figure out the standard deviation for the event, and calculate the z-score from that to see if you are truly outside of the norm or if you are within one standard deviation from everyone else.

When it comes to outliers, however, it would behoove us that we shouldn’t exclude them without good reasons. Outliers deserve special notice: we get to see what makes them different, if anything, and how the data would act, if they are excluded.

We would do well to remember that sometimes outliers can be the most important data points of them all!

What the real difficulty in making these comparisons is the fact that many of the European countries have a monolithic culture, and don’t have to deal with the same ethnic tensions present in the U.S. That will be changing with their crazy immigration policies though.
Regardless, the obvious problem in the U.S. is the near impossibility of forced institution of people who are obviously dangerous. The laws were changed due to abuses, however the legal system went too far the other way. It is not a gun problem, it is a mental health problem.

Absolutely not. That would be an egregious skewing of data. They only had one? Statistically for a nation of that size they should have zero. But they don’t. They have one. That’s not distorted data, that’s literally the undistorted data.

There were two reasons. 1) As you probably know, last year we did a report on Mass Public Shootings in the US since 2009. It was just handy to use that report and update that data for a comparison. 2) We spent the end of last week and the weekend putting the data together for Europe, and it was simply a question of time available to put the Europe data together. 2009 seemed like a doable length of time and it matched last year’s report.

What are the sources of the data. Was the study/analysis limited to the countries listed in the table? Were mass shooting death rates calculated annually based on population estimates for the same year, or were the deaths summed over the study period then the mass shooting death rates calculated for the most recent population estimate for the given country?

We also need to keep in mind that a large number of our states are bigger than an entire country in Europe, both in acreage and population. So to compare the entire USA to one country in Europe is giving a kind of lopsided view.

Not necessarily. Each country has their own, separate gun laws. The effectiveness or ineffectiveness of our gun laws are in question here. Each country should be listed separately, and adjusted to the size of the common denominator, the largest country to make it a fair comparison. I’m surprised so many peolpe cannot see this.

To put US in perspective, one has to compare with an approximate similar sized “country”. Of course, normalising the total numbers to obtain rates a step in the one direction. But the variation of the obtained numbers is much higher, due to the small sample size. So it’s only natural that a small country like finland tops easily. To make a valid comparison with european countries, one could e.g. take the whole EU, or compare the rates of US states with developed countries. Basic statistics, the error margin scales with 1/sqrt(#samplings).

However I propose we could look at the numbers, rates, percentages, whatever for each US state. Thereby assessing which states have the problem and those which do not.

Then maybe some of the arguments about little Norway on mass shooting versus all-world USA, or all-combined EU or of all Europe including non-EU countries versus all-combined USA, to cover Tony’s “Domestically, each state is sovereign in its affairs, which includes gun laws”.

Way up front, there was a clever skew of statistics by including bombings of Belgium because Obama used the term mass violence. Yet the dreadful 9/11 figures were omitted from the USA because the article wanted to get back to only shootings.

I am unsure why some Americans cannot accept that America is a country and instead keep trying to take this comparison down to the state level in their country when states are not mentioned in the various graphs.

I am also unsure why the authors attempted to utilise some sort of multiplication effect to bring the levels of some foreign countries up to or exceeding the American level of number of deaths. It seems rather pointless to me.

I am also unsure why the authors include Terrorist attacks which are clearly about sovereignty between sectarian groups and the central government of nations as examples of mass murder. The Terrorists clearly dispute whom is in control of their and others’ lives.

However, despite these quibbles, it makes interesting if distorted reading.

Dear Kola:
I am puzzled by your question. Could you please point to one place in the post above where the issue of states is mentioned or even central to the discussion? The point was that you can’t compare a country with 320 million people to a country with 5 million or even 80 million without taking into account the differences in population size. Do you disagree that countries need to be adjusted for size?

Editing issue?
“— None of the laws that Obama has put forward would have had any impact on either Newtown or Charleston. The Charleston killer apparently did pass a background check, and, in any case, he obtained his gun by stealing it from his Mom.”

The second half of the second sentence was probably intended to refer to the killer in Newtown but appears instead to be about the killer in Charleston. Might want to fix that.

It is correct. In both the Newtown and Charleston cases, the gun was taken from the mother. The point for the Newtown case was already well known. In the Charleston case, the mother was unharmed in the theft of the gun.

[…] a couple more. This first one looks at how terrorists choose their targets. The second is about Comparing Death Rates from Mass Public Shootings and Mass Public Violence in the US and Europe. Both are worthwhile […]

[…] Of course, across a narrow river with lots of bridges here in the free Commonwealth of Virginia, our crime rate continues to drop as the number of concealed carry permits and privately-owned firearms increases. Imagine that. More guns, less crime. […]

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John, I’m not sure why we would make a one to one comparison between Norway and the US in the first place. A better comparison would be to take the European Union as a whole. We are both a union of states, are we not?

[…] so much falsification in their political grandstanding… Here are some John Lott numbers: Comparing Death Rates from Mass Public Shootings and Mass Public Violence in the US and Europe – Cri… Cheers! Marc ut facile, Usurpate tamen! NRA Certified Instructor: Pistol; Personal […]

Just heard you on Mark Levin’s radio show yesterday and was wondering where I could get this information. Then I saw this in my Facebook feed, just now. Good stuff! I’m no gun expert, but I was a very good copy editor for Guns & Ammo magazine (also HANDGUNS, RifleShooter, and HUNTING) from 1989 to 1998 and have heard much of the pro-gun arguments (as well as many of the ridiculous anti-gun arguments). The problem with anti-gunners’ reasoning is that we can’t “compromise” with them and “try it their way” for a set time, then switch back if it doesn’t work. First, “switching back” is generally impossible. Second, their reasoning is not only faulty, it’s dangerous. If someone asked me to jump off a cliff “just once” to see if I liked it–and if not, I could quit–I would refuse to compromise on that also.

” “we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency.”

Aren’t you moving the goal posts when the statement is “mass violence” and the rebuttal focuses on Mass ‘Killings’ involving firearms as defined by the FBI?

4 or more deaths in public places excludes quite a few fellow citizens who were the recipients of firearm violence and/or were gunned down in private places. Is the shooting of large numbers of fellow residents to be excluded from “mass violence” due to an arbitrary choice of criteria?

From “Mass Murder in the United States: A History,” by Grant Duwe, director of research at the Minnesota Department of Corrections,
“Since 1900, the highest mass murder rate was in 1929. Mass public shootings are one of several types of mass murder and generally account for roughly 10-15 percent of all mass killings in the U.S.,” Duwe said.”
Addressing only deaths and not all victims of firearm violence ‘Mass Public’ shootings leave out 85% to 90% of all mass killings in the United States. Many of those non public deaths may not have been by firearms. Of those that were are the private victims any less dead?

If the premise is Mass Shootings, ie. involving four or more firearm casualties period, then there have been at least 295 (if the 10/2/2015 incident in Ocala, Fl is included) incidents this year alone.

If the time frame of mass shootings world wide was expanded to include modern history a better point in time would be the beginning of the 20th Century or even the the Charles Whitman Texas Tower shootings from 1966. Choosing a time frame based on an author’s convenience does us all a disservice.

No moving of goal posts. You have to have a consistent definition and we had already put the US data together using the FBI definition. If you can show that it alters the results to pick a different definition, I would appreciate it. As to the OECD, they are the organization of economic development, and they put together the list of developed countries. Under questioning, the WH said the president was referring to developed countries.

“Some people have defended President Obama’s statement by pointing to the word “frequency.” But, even if one puts it in terms of frequency, the president’s statement is still false, with the US ranking 9th compared to European countries.”

Of course he’s right and you’re wrong. You are trying to make an argument using a rate (which in this context is meaningless anyway). Even in the title of the second table, without knowing it, you are referring to a rate: ‘Events/Unit of time’ / ‘Count’ or ‘frequency’ / ‘count’. In other words, you are comparing the ratio between two different units, as discussed below. Where does Obama discuss rates in his statement? Please be specific.

Here are some important definitions that can help you for your future analyses:

Frequency: the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit time; the number of times a value recurs in a unit change of the independent variable of a given function.

Rate: a ratio that compares two quantities having different units of measure; is a comparison of two different quantities when they are combined together.

Even using your data (that are missing a very large number of mass shootings and mass murders), please reproduce the second table for the actual frequency of mass shootings for each country on list. Then, we can see if Obama was wrong to claim that the number of events (mass shootings) per unit of time is higher than any other developed countries.

You’re just wrong. If you understand numbers and probability, you should know that you cannot compare rates when the occurences are so low in europe and so high in the US. For exemple, a small country in europe with almost no gun violence > suddenly, a mass shooting happens… Its rate is gonna go through the roof because of that, but it wont mean anything. What you can do is taking a number of european countries to match the US popluation and compare the occurence. Gun violence in the US is crazy high, everybody knows and sees it abroad. Moreover, guns being easily available with few background checks will mechanically increase the gun death numbers, it’s been proven again and again. For exemple, do you know where you’ll find the most firearm related death in france ? In the hunting community. How strange ! The only community that actually owns and uses guns.

Could you post a breakdown, as you did above for European incidences, of the shootings that you have used to find your USA numbers please? (Date/ Location/ Fatalities/ Non-Fatal Injuries)
This could help add some perspective as you did said above, some numbers were omitted.

Here’s something I’m not sure why no one has picked up on yet. Australia post 1996. Mass killings still happen. The only thing that’s changed is choice of weapon for th most part. Firearms are still used as well.

Wiki, Austrailia mass killings

Port Arthur massacre – In 1996, armed with two semi-automatic rifles, Martin Bryant killed 35 people around Port Arthur and wounded 21 before being caught by police the next day following an overnight siege.
Childers Palace Fire – In June 2000, drifter and con-artist Robert Long started a fire at the Childers Palace backpackers hostel that killed 15 people.
Sef Gonzales – On July 10, 2001, Sef Gonzales bludgeoned to death his sister, mother and father with a baseball bat.
Monash University shooting – In October 2002, Huan Yun Xiang, a student, shot his classmates and teacher, killing two and injuring five.
Churchill Fire – 10 confirmed deaths due to a deliberately lit fire. The fire was lit on 7 February 2009.[5]
Lin family murders – On July 2009, Lian Bin “Robert” Xie killed his sister, her husband and three members of their family (5 persons from the Lin family) with a hammer. The faces of the victims were so disfigured that forensics had to be used to identify them. The motivation for the family massacre were partly because Lin had criticised Xie for not having a job.
2011 Hectorville siege – A mass shooting that took place on Friday, April 29, 2011, in Hectorville, South Australia. It began after a 39-year-old male, Donato Anthony Corbo, went on a shooting rampage, killing three people and wounding a child and two police officers, before being arrested by Special Operations police after an eight-hour siege.[6]
Quakers Hill Nursing Home Fire – 10 confirmed and as many as 21 people may have died as a result of a deliberately lit fire in a Quakers Hill nursing home. The fire was lit early on 18 November 2011.[7]
Hunt family murders – Geoff Hunt killed his wife and three children before turning the gun on himself on September 9, 2014.[8]
Cairns stabbings – A woman stabbed 8 children to death on Friday, 2014, December 19, 2014. 7 of them were her own.[9]

Here in Brazil, we went through a difficult time, you foreigners who want to come and meet, or come to the Olympic Games, not because the violence here is out of control, a corrupt government that only thinks about stealing, and still call themselves patria educator, we have no health, no education, we don’t have public transportation, so robbery, a Communist Party that controls and ended up with all

This article only shows “mass shooting” and completely ignore the thousands of other people killed by gun violence as being irrelevant since they were not accommodating enough to die in a mass shooting event. Try re-writing the article to include these people and see how the numbers change.
Lets just take a small number of gun violence victims and write a biased article to show some poorly thought out point.

…because that’s what this particular study is studying. It would invalidate the study into this particular topic if he were to mash other topics into it…so are you saying studying mass shootings is not allowed or something?

He has other studies that are on the subject you’re talking about as well.

the OECD chart actually proves Obamas claims.
Take Russia and Brazil apart (not developed countries, anyway), and look at Europe.
Earlier in this article you’ve stated that UK or German rates are at higher level than in US, but the OECD chart shows homicide rate is significantly lower than in the US.
Within Europe Norways is high, but this also proves Obamas point, as in Norway access to the weapon is very easy.

Of course, most people consider both Russia and Brazil developed countries, and you don’t explain why you’ve simply discarded Mexico and Chile and look solely at Europe. For the UK/Germany issue, simply read the article with greater care. Note the difference between “homicide rate” and the rate of mass shootings with more than 15 victims.

A little off topic… but in line with thinking of ways to lessen shooting incidents. (I don’t believe it’s realistic to think that we will ever end ALL gun violence.) Because, as citizens of the United States, we are free to own firearms, I believe that everyone should be educated on gun safety. I believe that our school system would be an excellent place to carry this out. Everyone knows, intellectually, that guns kill. But ignorance is unacceptable. There’s more to understanding guns than how to load and shoot. As always, education is the key. Recognizing the true power behind a firearm is vitally important. Kids watch TV and play games that give an inaccurate depiction of what happens when a gun is shot. And there are so many people out there telling kids that hunting is wrong. Yet, hunting and target shooting are really the only proper uses for firearms. With all the mixed messages kids get, it’s not shocking that we have problems with gun violence. We need to start somewhere.

None of these mass public shooters killed multiple people because they lacked safety training. Eliminate so-called “gun free” zones, where mass shooters elect to do their deeds, and deny them the posthumous fame most of them are after.

Mass shooters don’t elect for gun free zones. It isn’t a strategy and it’s a base canard to suggest as much. Much like Dillinger famously said of bank robbers robbing banks because ‘that’s where the money is’, mass shooters hit schools and workplaces because that is where the people that offended them, wouldn’t date them, ‘harassed them’ are located. There is NO evidence to suggest otherwise.

Actually there is some. The man who shot up the theater where they were showing Batman several years ago by passed other theaters that were closer to pick the one that he did which happened to be a gun free zone. The others were not. It is only one example But IIRC there have be others also. If a person wants specific revenge the venue is important if they are generalized then gun free zones seem to be the place of choice.

Why developing countries like FYROM, Mexico, Serbia included? Surely a fully developed legal system is needed for inclusion. Also Russia attacks by Chechan separatists included? Why not include Syria and Iraq too?

Syria’s murder rate for 2015 was toppled by Brazil and Honduras who is still reigns top with 103 deaths per capita 2014 report and average is 84 per capita. Funny how people will support a country for political gain, but ignore the rest who have a greater need!

Well, Thomas, please go through the list (each case is provided) and tell me what we got wrong. I would be very interested to know if you have cases for Europe that you don’t think that we should have. There are many US states that have had no mass public shootings, so it isn’t too surprising that you can find some areas of Europe that are the same way. But as I say, the list of cases are there and they should be very easy for you to search for on the internet. Thanks.

This does make for interesting reading. Over the past half century gun ownership has become ever more derided. Quite why that is I’ve yet to understand but here in Brazil many parents are scandalized at the thought of a 10- or 11-year old learning to shoot at an acredited shooting club before admitting that they were taught someone in a field at the same age or younger.

The US is way behind the big 4 European countries against which it should be best compared – for supposed advancement and also so that small countries with distorting one offs could be excluded. Being behind former Yugoslavian countries is absolutely nothing to be proud of either.

Availability of guns = more likely to be mass killings. It’s stating the obvious. The means are there.

Also you ignore the higher suicide rates that availability of guns allows – again, the means is there.

Brazil is a country with very strong laws about gun control. Its very hard to buy a legalized gun in Brazil and legally carry a gun is almost impossible, but outlaws doesn’t mind about it, and the victims are the ones who follow the laws… Mass public shootings hardly happens here, but every day 154 brazilians are killed, and we have a strong gun control. GUN CONTROL DEFINITELY DON’T WORK, IT JUST TAKE THE GUNS FROM THE GOOD GUYS, THE BAD GUYS DOESN’T MIND ABOUT LAWS.

1) Can you publish the source data used to generate these averages?
2) As a professional analyst, do you stand by this statement? If we scaled Norway to the size of the US, you believe they would have 16 times the number of attacks?

“If they suffered attacks at a rate adjusted for their population, Norway, Israel and Australia would have had attacks that were respectively 16, 11, and 3 times greater than the US.”

The President and his supporters are Neoprogs- Progressives love using a lie to advance their agenda, and believing the lie for the same reason. When it comes to neoprogs, you can fool all of them. all of the time. So, I appreciate the statistics and am not surprised by the data, but it will not change a neoprog’s mind. Facts mean nothing, they swallow the lie every time.

Whats interesting is the big picture is being missed across the boards. The common denominator of mass shootings is simply one. In over 90% of all US mass shooting the shooter was on heavy psychiatric drugs. at the time of the shootings or in withdrawal from taking such drugs. mass murderers for the most part are not born. They are made by psychiatry. All antidepressant drugs bring violent murderous and suicidal thoughts because they are toxic to the brain Period. get rid of psychiatry and psychiatric poisonous drugs and you get rid of mass murderers. Even Adolph Hitler never mass murdered until his quack doctor/psych buried him alive in psychotropic drugs and compounds. Its an easy lesson. People on psychiatric drugs are very dangerous to the rest of the society. That’s what makes them dangerous. Should people on psychiatric drugs own guns? If they are so nuts they are on those drugs why should they own of have access to fire arms?

Hi, I am in a facebook discussion with a former colleague of mine from Texas. I myself are from the Netherlands. We both have strong opinions on the subject. Me, being a somewhat leftish European, am, not surprisingly, agreeing with the position of Obama. He, being from Texas…well you can do the math 😉
What think is:
– guncontroll does not offer 100% safety from mass shootings or homicides. We have had our episode too in NL, with the mass shooting in Alphen (listed in the report). And the person was a member of a shooting club, but also a borderline case. So the ‘system’ did not work here.
– there is nothing against a responsible citizin owning a firearm, for e.g. sporting purposes. It is the person that uses the gun that is to blame, not the gun itself
– the reason I am a supporter of the good regulation is the same reason I am for a strong, responsible government that looks after the common interest. If you believe in common sense, you cannot but believe in responsible government, at least, if you are in a democracy, because at the end of the day, we, by electing, put government in its place…one could say that you get the government you deserve in a democracy. That is why it so important to look beyond the ‘here and now’. But ultimatelly I rather have professionals handling guns (i.e. the police) then a friendly neighbour. Not because I do not trust my neighbour, but because the monopoly of violance should reside with law-enforcement. Because that is the closest we can get to an objective, valuefree institution. ANd yes, policemen are also common people, like you and me, but they are professionals and it is their main duty to serve and protect.
Any other position on the role of the law in a democracy is cynical and says more about the person itself.
My colleague made a comparision between guns and cars… that you cannot blame the car when a drunken person causes a serious accident. Very true, but there is also, esp. in the US strong enforcement of the traffic rules…. Why not do the same with guns ? And for that matter, cars are not intended to cause accidents, but to get you from a to b. Now for guns….that is a different matter. They have been designed and invented for warfare and not just for hunting, or at least not the automatic and semi-automatic assault weapons….

Wanted to point out a few things. Regarding that comparison between cars and guns, isn’t it interesting how one is designed mostly for killing (actually arguable but I’m giving your argument the benefit in this post) while the other is designed almost entirely for transportation, the rate of ownership in the U.S. is very similar between the two, yet the death rate is very similar too? In fact, one of these things is used for murder far, far more often than the other, as well as suicide, yet the total death rates are still similar. Why then would the people of our nation be so adamantly glued to their opinion against ownership of one but not the other? Please feel free to compare the statistics against every other nation and share your findings.

Now regarding your opinion that you’d rather just have professionals handling guns, one of the main reasons for the existence of the 2nd amendment is the obvious realization that throughout history, professionals (one could say, those licensed by the people in charge) were the only ones allowed to be armed. You could say this was to keep people safe, but when you look at historical context, it was more often for the purpose of keeping those out of power, out of power. If you subscribe to the notion that it’s best for the common rabble to succumb to the wisdom of their political or perhaps social elite, well then all I can say is that you should enlighten yourself by studying history further.

A third of American households have a gun, many more than that have cars so right off the bat your arguments falls apart on rate of ownership. Why would anyone listen to you beyond that first critical mistake? The doomsday option made sense when your musket was as good as my musket. This is no longer the case. You have zero chance of successfully resisting a tyrannical U.S. government with your civilian legal weapons….zero chance.

Zero chance, huh? I would propose that the Government has zero chance of actually banning and confiscating a significant number of the guns, so why bother with that?

I’ve been listening to a podcast on revolutions, and one thing I’ve concluded (particularly after listening about the French Revolution) is that anything can happen when a government collapses, and I would much rather be armed and in a position to choose, one way or another, one of the competing sides or none of them, and have the freedom to shoot back at anyone who has come to kill me, even if I have zero chance of surviving the tyranny to come.

Sure, I might not win. But then, who wants to live in a society where the government freely uses tanks, fighter jets, and bombs against its own citizens?

Yes, your numbers seem to be very close to actual events on this side of the Atlantic, so at first glance you seem to have a valid point. Given the more fragmented nature of the European `State´ (as in cultures, languages, media infrastructures etc etc’) incidents on our continent do not accumulate in the public eye, while the US occurrences seem to be amplified by the media frenzy accompanying these events.

So I tend to agree with your point that we have similar levels of ´successful´ lunie´s, who have lost their way and have gone out with a bang or even several bangs.

This is a very incomplete picture though, since the US has had their string of questionable police shootings, the regular criminal activities supported by guns, the crimes of passion, the accidental shootings and so forth. I´m quite certain my impression of the US reality is somewhat distorted since the media tends to report on the sick and ugly events, however I´m quite certain that if you were to compare numbers on total shootings with fatalities US vs EU you´d get a fairer, more insightful comparison of the effects of such high number of firearms present in the general population.

One last comment on your approach, you´ve constructed a seemingly fair case which indicates your President wasn´t completely familiar with all the foreign wacko´s. So kudo´s on that aspect of your work. However, reducing these events to their statitistics seems to enable you to bypass the actual meaning of such an event, so many families which will never be complete again, others are scarred for life. Places which should be safe and allow for growth and development turned into places of violence and fear. Given how grotesk such an experience must be, please respect the experience of those who lived through it and recognize that each mass shooting is one too many.

Figures don’t lie, but liars figure. It is obvious how this article was figured and written. There is one commonality in 100% of these mass shootings, they were done with guns. No matter what figures are carted out or what reasoning for the shooters motives, the fact of the matter is these violent crimes were committed with the same tool. A tool that if used correctly kills or destroys its target.

By definition, mass shootings require guns. And mass killings using bombs all require bombs, and mass killings using knives all require knives. Same for hammers, baseball bats and even hands and feet.

On your other attempt at a point, if displaying a gun in self defense stops the crime, does that not also constitute a correct use of a gun? It doesn’t even have to be fired, much less shoot or kill someone to work as intended in self defense.

Sometimes the most obvious and basic facts escape notice if you’re only looking in one direction.

Seems like I read that if you take the five largest cities with high gun violence (such as Chicago and DC that both have strong gun control laws), the US falls way down on the charts in comparison to other countries gun violence. Gun control laws do not work!

The only chart and statistics that mean anything is the last chart – Homicide Rates for Developed Countries. The USA to be the fifth worse only behind Chile, Russia, Mexico, and Brazil. Not great company to be associated. Our overall homicide rate looks to be 3 to 5 times higher than most other countries including Japan, the United Kingdom, Austria, Italy, Germany, Spain, France, etc. Most of those countries look to have an overall homicide rate of less than 1 while ours is slightly over 5. Individual statistics be manipulated by adjusting what data is or is not included in the calculations. What constitutes a “mass public shooting?” Is it 2 people, 5 people, 10 people, etc. Overall statistics based on total homicides and total population numbers are harder to fudge. The last chart tells the story – the USA has a homicide problem.

I’m surprised nobody mentions how our immigration and border control policies within the European Union suck? Talking about guns, if you knew how easy it is to smuggle guns from let’s say Bulgaria to Norway… there are barely any controls, if not none in between all of these countries if you take trains and do it intelligently. It’s very likely that none of these guns were purchased, or even originated from Norway or similar countries…

Availability of guns isn’t the issue within the European Union. The issues are related to the lack of security. There are no controls, no monitoring in between European countries. Maybe one border control check up will occur over dozens of thousands of cars coming through…

[…] guns. In Europe, there have been no exceptions. Every mass public shooting — and there have been plenty of mass shooting in Europe — has occurred in a gun-free zone. In addition, they have had three of the six worst K–12 […]

[…] guns. In Europe, there have been no exceptions. Every mass public shooting — and there have been plenty of mass shooting in Europe — has occurred in a gun-free zone. In addition, they have had three of the six worst K–12 […]

[…] guns. In Europe, there have been no exceptions. Every mass public shooting — and there have been plenty of mass shooting in Europe — has occurred in a gun-free zone. In addition, they have had three of the six worst K–12 […]

Interesting way to maliciously manipulate data. We take some small countries where 1 shooting occurred (like Norway) excluding of course small countries where no public shooting ever occurred. Since such countries have very small population, one case is enough to have a high frequency and so United States goes down in the ranking. Most readers won’t notice that all countries with a population comparable to the one of United States are much lower that US, confirming just what the article was supposed to deny…

This is why calculating rates in this context is meaningless. Our president was talking about frequency (events/time) and Lott decided to divide the frequency by the population to get a rate, which means that we are comparing apples with oranges.

Coloregrano, I’m not sure if you read the article very thoroughly. The author was not manipulating data. Please allow me to quote the article:

“Small countries such as Norway, Israel and Australia may have only one major attack each, one-fourth of what the U.S. has suffered, but the US population is vastly greater. If they suffered attacks at a rate adjusted for their population, Norway, Israel and Australia would have had attacks that were respectively 16, 11, and 3 times greater than the US.”

Obviously with the U.S. having more people, one would expect the U.S. to have more total shootings than a much smaller country. That’s part of the point the author is making. He is providing the data on a per capita basis.

It seems those prone to an emotional reaction to such events are the ones most easily manipulated by the corporate media who, after all, are in the business of “selling soap” and not necessarily providing objective coverage.

On the other hand, those of us who tend to rather dispassionately review data see clearly the true “length and breadth” of the issue tend to dismiss the “knee jerk” reactions. Unfortunately there seems to be very little common ground between the two groups, and the former group tends to be the squeaky wheel.

Exactly right. Realizing that Norway has approximately 5.1 million, they don’t appear to have even a single death from a mass shooting in 5 years. But that aside, the more ridiculous point is that the author quickly glides over the fact that he’s excluding deaths of certain “categories” and offers only 2 examples, gang fights, and robberies. But look closely at the numbers of the U.S. , multiplying the rate per million by 320 (population approx 320 million) to get the raw numbers, and you see that the U.S. somehow averages roughly 30 deaths from mass shootings per year. Huh? I realize they are subtracting the gang deaths (as they like to point out) but they are also subtracting a heck of a lot of other categories that they did not specify. This year there have been 462 people shot and killed in mass shootings. In other words, they seem to be excluding about 95% of the shooting deaths. That is a helluva lot more than just gang deaths and robberies. Total Bullshit article.

I’ve had it with people saying America is not the greatest nation on the face of God’s Earth. I mean, first Norway beats us in quality and outcome of their education system and now they’re beating us in terms of the number and frequency of mass shootings? That’s the last straw! Wake the hell up, America. Don’t let those damn Scandinavians beat us anymore; let’s all work together to get those numbers up and make America great again. ‘Murica!

The problem with listing it this way is it skews the perception of Norway. Regardless of total population, a better statistic to look at would be number of shootings with 4+ deaths per year per country.

A country with just one shooting over an extended period could be deemed as an outlier. Events may happen without and rhyme or reason. But events happen on a regular basis shows there is something systematically wrong.

This article is trying to provide ammo for Republicans against the left. I’m for the people being armed and what not, but if you are going to provide numbers to back an argument, you need to use them reasonably and correctly. Not forcing a skew to prove your point.

I don’t see why we shouldn’t consider population in that analysis. Or, for that matter, consider breaking up America into 65 Norway-population size chunks, and then count how many mass shootings per year happen in those chunks.

If we were to do that, then I’m sure that the mass-shooting events in the United States that seem to occur on a regular basis will suddenly seem much more like Norway. (Well, depending on how you define mass shootings, the Chicago area will certainly *not* look like Norway…)

The overreaching issue is not “Mass Shootings” as they are rather insignificant compared to the number homicides caused by guns. The chart clearly shows the United States has the worst homicide problem compared to its peers except the ever slightly better Norway. Sorry, but counting Mexico, Brazil, Russia, and Chile are not acceptable for comparison. No offense, but these places are like banana republics, not truly first world. Mexico has a massive drug cartel problems for starters; Shocking and sad that the United States, so close to Mexico as it is. We should be looking at the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Australia, etc. and try to be more on par with these countries. So chop Obama comments up however to the liking of your political rhetoric, but would have huge gun problem in the United States. There is a very strong correlation between states with the strictest gun laws and reduced gun homicide death on a per capita basis. This is an easily verifiable fact. If you one wants to argue against more/better gun control, please do NOT say that more guns in the hands of good citizens is safer. That argument truly doesn’t stand up to the facts. The much better and more respectable argument is that you feel it is your god-given right (I’m atheist, but you get the point) to have gun, and the government should interfere with that right. I disagree due to the amount of harm especially in terms of death it causes innocent people, but that the argument is valid. I personally believe all drugs should be legal (see Portugal success story) because the government should not be controlling what one does especially when there is little harm imposed on other people (I heard the screaming now). I also believe the NSA should not be allowed to spy on Americans without probably cause even though I’m doing nothing wrong. Once could argue that such as position could lead to another attack/shooting, which is more than fair to say because that is true. I would say that the act of the United States improperly spying on citizens tramples upon the very freedom that the United States intended to protect. So please, tell me the government has no right to put into effect restrictive gun control law, just don’t tell me it makes the United States safer. The evidence is overwhelming, and it does not.

Obama said that mass shootings don’t happen “in other places with this type of frequency.” He didn’t say “in other places with this type of frequency per capita.” Accordingly, in determining the frequency, the numerator is the number of mass shootings and the denominator is “other places” in which case, he is correct. Your eagerness to contradict Obama overrides your critical faculties as analysts.

I have read through almost all of these comments and it amazes me that people can’t understand why you can’t compare a country with over 300 million people to a country with 5 million people without putting those comparisons into a formula that takes into account population differences between the 2. It’s no wonder that our rights are being systematically stripped from us one by one, we are most definitely an uneducated bunch…and that’s being kind. I guess this is the same reason our President can go on and on about how the unemployment rate has fallen without explaining that the unemployment rate is tied to a direct ratio of the worker participation rate (which has also drastically fallen) and nobody questions it (Formula is UR = # without a job/worker participation rate). If the numerator (number of persons without work) stays the same and the denominator (worker participation rate) decreases, you’re percentage is going to automatically be lower…without doing a thing. I applaud your efforts, Dr Lott, in using transparency and factual statistics to shed some truth onto this whole “mass violence” situation. It’s a shame that our schools haven’t educated the American people enough to understand them.

The number for Norway is the result of a single incident (Breivik, 2011). You will always find a smaller country at the top of such a list, as the variation of a smaller sample is automatically higher.

One can debate if a murder of 4 people (as used for the statistics) consists of a mass shooting. As well as labeling a terrorist attack where guns where involved, that’s hardly a mass shooting, but more an act of war. Or would you count every gunfight involving US troops a mass shooting? Then US would surely top the list by a big margin!

Also, the statement was about mass shootings. Of course, including gun murder, it looks much different. The US has a factor of 3-10 times the rate of comparable european developped countries. Including Brazil/Mexico/Russia as a comparison is a serious distortion, where e.g. lots of drug war related crimes are included.http://i.cfr.org/content/publications/firearms2.jpg

According to those statistics, approximately 10.5 out of 5.14 million people in Norway die in mass shootings (4 or more deaths) per year. Macedonia: 0.78 out of 2.08 million people per year, Serbia: 2.01 out of 7.13 million people per year die in mass shootings. Slovakia: 1.08 5.42 million people per year. Finland: 0.77 out of 5.46 million people per year/ Belgium: 1.5 out of 11.23 million people per year. Czech Republic: 1.39 out of 10.51 million people per year. United States of America: 30.29 out of 318.86 million people per year. Consider all of that information, Norway statistically has an average of 2.5 mass shootings per year. Macedonia, Slovakia, and Finland have one mass shooting every four years, again as a statistical average. Serbia statistically has one every other year. Belgium and The Czech Republic statistically have a mass shooting every 3 years. The United States has an average of 7.5 mass shootings per year. These averages reflect what the table above presents and the study was from 2009 to 2015 according to the attached article. I’m sure you weren’t wondering, but it came up in the article and I thought it was interesting: Norway’s population is closest to Colorado (2014 US Census data), Macedonia’s population is closest to New Mexico, Serbia’s is closest to Washington; Finland and Slovakia’s populations are closest to that of Minnesota, Belgium’s population is closest to Ohio, and The Czech Republic’s population is closest to that of Georgia. My point is that data and statistics can be drastically skewed to make the numbers look presentable to people unwilling to give them more than a glance.

I was just wondering how the European countries listed above were chosen? For example, where are Spain, Portugal, Poland, Ireland and all the other countries in Europe? How would the the ‘ranking’ of the U.S. be affected if you added all of them? Or compared the U.S. to Europe as a whole?

I also agree with the idea suggested by someone above, that it makes more sense to show the statistics on a year by year basis for each country, making it clear whether any statistics might be outliers. I’m half Norwegian, and I’m pretty sure John Lott doesn’t really think Norway would have sixteen times more mass shooting deaths than the U.S. if it was the same size?

Thanks very much, James. The definition is provided in the third paragraph of the post. That same paragraph explains how we put the list together using a news search. The links also go into those points more.

Nice Article, but I see no reason to compare us to any other country. Our Society is completely different, our laws are different. Anyone looking at mass shootings, first needs to look at the rest of our death’s in the country.

The Mass murders are only a fraction of the problem.
So, why is Obama so intent on going after guns, when Mass Murders are only a small fraction of the problem. Especially when any law that is in place, or he could put in place could not have stopped Sandy Hook, or any other Mass shooting?
That is the question, that I have.

Could it be that George Soros, who put Obama in the Senate, and the President wants guns banned in the United States? Could it have something to do with the U.N. Small Arms treaty that every Democrat voted for last year?
That would have basically outlawed most Ammo in the United States. Obama is going after guns for a reason, and it’s not what most believe.

Very smart to show frequency as -attacks per million population-, the basics of a mass shooting is a person with a weapon trying to kill other people. The US having 300+k population will always dilute any number of casualties in any shooting, and even well organized and/or skilled attacker(s) will not manage to kill more than a couple of dozen people so accounting in attacks per million population would missguide us to think the US is faring well. Going back to the basics, the subject of this analysis should be the attacker him/herself, regardless how many people is killed or even if none are killed. If I were the Sheriff of my wild west town I would be interested in knowing how many lunatics are out there with the will to go out and kill by the masses and I would keep a record of how many of those lunatics tried it every year, regardless of how many people they killed, that would be data for sub-sequent analysis but I think the gun lobbiers (aka, the “Crime Prevention Research Center”), in their rush to defend their god-given right to own guns, over-rationalize all this things and convince themselves that things are fine.

The problem is Americans are more focused on wining the argument rather than solving the problem.

[…] first statistic neglects that most of those deaths are suicides, and the second claim isn’t true either. I only bring those statistics up because they’re the only ones I constantly hear in favor of gun […]

[…] first statistic neglects that most of those deaths are suicides, and the second claim isn’t true either. I only bring those statistics up because they’re the only ones I constantly hear in favor of gun […]

I think a more meaningful treatment would be the average of the median number of mass shootings per captita per annum for each territory. This would tend to iron out statistical aberrations. However, because of sampling it would probably make sense to amalgamate certain zones. For example breaking the US into (say) 6 segments, amalgamating the Scandinavian countries and so on.

This would be a more reliable source of debate.
And yes I have qualifications in both statistics and informatics.

Oops. I meant to split some territories and amalgamate others.
The point Im trying to make is comparing the stats of a country of 300M like USA, Russia, Brazil, with small mostly agrarian nations like Norway isn’t helpful.
I would suggest trying to segment the sample into things like:
USA NE, NW, SE, SW, Central; about 55M each
Scandinavia
BeNeLux
and so on.

[…] when the other side couldn’t care less about how they use data at all. Take, for example, the attempt by John Lott to debunk President Obama’s claim about the frequency of mass shootings in the […]

Dear Peter:
The point of this research was to point out that while the US makes up about 4.4% of the world population, we account for less than 4.5% of mass public shooting deaths in cases where 15 or more people are killed.

This site is not particularly useful. There is a reason why we don’t rely on initial news reports for classifying shooting deaths as murders, homicides, accidents or suicides. Are gang fights the same as other types of shootings? Do you think that banning guns will keep drug gangs from getting guns and more than bans on illegal drugs keep gangs from getting those drugs?

Living in the UK and having such strict gun ownership laws, which dramatically restrict unlawful persons from getting firearms I feel for the state the US is in. Arguably it has passed the tipping point where banning guns would not work. I do feel that strict background checks to inhibit the purchase of legally bought guns is a benefit though. Additionally the UK and Europe suffer far more terrorism related mass casualty incidents, it would be interesting to see the statistics relating to general crime, terrorism and gang related incidents.

[…] The CPRC post challenging President Obama’s statements starts with a pertinent point about data analysis: “We prefer not to make purely cross-sectional comparisons. . . .” By that, Lott and his team mean that you can’t look at the U.S.’s gun crime rate and England’s comparatively lower gun crime rate and then announce “England’s gun ban explains the lower crime rate.” The lower crime rate is explained by the fact that England has always had a lower crime rate than the young, sprawling, diverse, frontier world of the United States. The useful analysis when it comes to gun crime is to see what happens in a given country when that country bans guns. (I’m not giving anything away when I say crime invariably soars.) […]

Let’s look at the numbers a little differently. In your time frame the U.S.had 25 mass shootings, France had 6. Now deaths per capita are higher in France than the U.S. But the overall number of mass shootings are far greater in the U.S. Your chart shows that during that time there were 25 mass shootings in the U.S. and 25 for all of the European Union which has roughly 200 million more people than the us according to your chart. Let’s not look at how many died, just look at how many times it has happened

1) People are unable to understand (or unwilling to understand) that a “rate” of occurence in effect normalizes a comparison to a common metric.

2) That the only way to stop a crazed gunman is with equal or greater force.

3) Bad guys will ALWAYS find guns to kill, no matter how many laws are on the books.

To simplify this so even the most unwilling of readers can “get it”, if City A had 5 car thefts in 2015 with a population of 10,000, and City B had 100 car thefts with a population of 5,000, then the rate of car theft for A is 5/10,000, or 1/2,000 and the rate for B is 100/5,000 or 1/50. But now we have to normalize the population, which means in essence that we need a common denominator. In this case, 2,000 serves as the Least Common Denominator (LCD). Hence, 1/2000 compared to 40/2000,; CONCLUSION: City A has 1 car theft for every 2,000 residents and City B has 40 car thefts for every 2,000 residents. Which city would you move to if you owned a Ferrari?

The second point is highlighted by how gun rampages are stopped: the gunman either shoots himself WITH A GUN, or law enforcement kills him WITH A GUN, or a good citizen kills him WITH A GUN. Gun free zones mean the rampage is not stopped until 2nd responders arrive (police, etc), but by then many are dead. In all cases, we see the victims were defenseless because they were unarmed.

The third point is proven over and over again, with Paris being a simple recent example. The gun laws are very strict in France, and at the time, Paris city police were mostly unarmed. The terrorist were able to get AK-47s and bombs. Even in countrys with full confiscation or buy back, the bad guys will get guns on the black market.

Now, as more is revealed about the Orlando shooting, we see that this Islamic radical had been under investigation by the FBI, BUT THEY DROPPED THE CASE and instead want to blame innocent, law abiding gun owners. But that’s no surprise, because it is done each and every time. They simply ignore these three basic truths.

There is only one conclusion that one can make relative to people who cannot understand these basic truths: THEY HAVE MENTAL DISORDERS or are severely “IQ-HANDICAPPED”.

Only 3 % of armed citizen return fire in case of shooting.. so 1 of 30 people involved. Statistically if there is less than 30 people involved, “good guys” wont fire back. What is the purpose of their guns in this case? USA is clearly the most violent western country in the world, and the only one with a licence to carry. Conclusion?

There is no simple answer but what all Americans must agree on is the purchasing of guns has to become a lot harder with more checks and longer waiting periods. It cannot be right that I could take a trip down to the local Walmart and come home with an assault rifle. The checks need to be hard and vigorous and paid for by the gun manufacturers. Why would anyone want an assault rifle? Please dont say for protection as if you are a sensible gun owner it will be locked away and therefore useless in a home invasion etc. Things have to change to stop our children dying. Gun deaths are the 2nd biggest killer in 15-24 year olds. All you pro gun lobbyists chew on that stat for a while!

So, I know this is old, but I can’t be the only one who noticed he wrote that AUSTRALIA was a small country???
I could not read anymore after that statement!!! Australia is bigger than you think, Europe big, Africa big. 😀

Using per-capita numbers in the case of extremely rare events is extremely misleading, because small changes in the number of events can make huge differences in the per-capita numbers. If, for example, Norway had experienced *one* more mass shooting during the period under consideration, its per-capita frequency would have doubled; one *less*, and its per-capita frequency would have been zero. The fact that the US experienced as many mass public shooting events during 2009-2015 as *all of Europe* suggests that access to guns might actually be the significant factor.

Well, some of those countries such as France are large countries. But if you believe that is the case, we have also provided the numbers for the EU as a whole and its death rate from mass public shootings is very similar to the rate for the US as a whole and their injury rate from these attacks is twice the rate for the US. How do you really make a comparison with out adjusting for population.

By not adjusting. What facts do you have that population makes a significant difference? You fail to provide any evidence of that. You just adjust it out of assumption that if the population were larger the rate would increase. There’s no way to single out a group of people and say a certain percentage of them will be killers. It could be a massive migration of lower income persons who increase the population count exponentially which, if reports are true about the relation between income brackets and frequency of violent crime, may skew violence numbers. It’s happened here in Florida.

This article was twisting the data as much as possible. I have spent time looking into the deaths from mass shootings in the US and the UK and there have been 49 in the UK in the past 50 years, which when adjusted for population is about the same as 245 in the US. In the US, there were 475 deaths in 2015 alone. Yet this article is counting only mass shootings with more than 15 deaths to skew the results and make it look like the UK has half as many as the US does! It is still incorrect even then, as the mass shootings in the US with 15 or more dead have been worse than those in the UK, which were only just over 15. This article is blatantly twisting the truth to fit its own agenda.

Notice that the death rate for the EU as a whole during the Obama administration is very similar to the death rate in the US. Could you pick one state or even a set of state with virtually no mass public shootings? Sure. But that is not useful any more than picking one country in Europe.

Norwegian here, just have to chime in. We have only had one mass shooting during the third millennium, known only as 22nd july (in 2011), where a single person named Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people. This is an enormous amount compared to our tiny population of roughly 5 million. No one ever gets shot here, no gun accidents ever happen because of our civilized gun laws. Not a single person I know lives in fear of the daily tragedies you people experience because of your corrupt politicians and outdated laws. Even seeing a gun here will scare the shit out of most people, because guns simply do not exist in the open. Not even police officers carry weapons here, unless very strict conditions are met and/or there is a situation demanding it with regards to national security. Not a single norwegian person has been killed by the police for the last 10 years. This should be an eye-opener.

While statistics can be deceiving (this article is a prime example), the fact remains that compared to Scandinavian countries, the US is a battle zone that claims innocent lives on a daily basis. If we allowed our citizens to buy semi-automatic rifles on a whim, if we had something similar to the NRA and political candidates like Clinton and Trump, our country would be ruined. We have reached a point where this is simply unimaginable. It’s like you guys are living on a different planet. The majority of us are afraid to even visit the US. I’ve seen less corruption and more stability in 3rd world countries. There is something fundamentally wrong with your society, and any Norwegian citizen would agree with me on this. It is a daily topic here, discussing US tragedies is as common as discussing the weather. With time, hopefully, your society will develop into a Scandinavian model like the one Bernie wants, with free education for everyone, a single-payer health care system, strict laws regulating the public’s access to weapons, and your crime rates will fall dramatically. Compared to ours, your society is primitive. This is the honest truth. I sure hope it improves fast so no more innocent US lives will be taken on a daily basis by terrorists or by your police (which is 55 times more likely to happen). Scandinavian countries have topped the annual polls of the best country to live in worldwide for as long as I can remember, it’s not a coincidence. There is something fundamentally wrong with the US.

Magnus if you note that we also provide a comparison to the EU as a whole, and the EU death rate is very similar and their injury rate is twice as high. We break down the results by both the EU as a whole and also by individual countries. Doing both is just our way of being through.https://crimeresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Screen-Shot-2016-04-05-at-Tuesday-April-5-1.04-AM.png
In any case, one has to adjust for population differences. The US has a population of 320 million. Norway has 5 million. Finland, which also had shootings, has a population of only 5.4 million. You can find plenty of states in the US that have similar populations and have not had any mass public shootings.

This is BAD statistical analysis, not worth the name “scientific”. You compare USA (about 300 million people) vs little countries like Norway, Albania and my own country Belgium. Of course that some small countries will have a higher “shooting rate” than the US, just as some of them will have a much smaller rate. You should have compared a population of 300 mil. against a population of a similar size (and cultural background) like the EU (510 mil.)

Well, Art TwentyFive, if you read the discussion, you would see that we provided both the per capita breakdown by individual country as well as a comparison for the entire European Union to the US. Unlike most people who simply compare the US to individual countries in Europe (and we would agree that is misleading), we look at the per capita rates. You have to adjust for population differences whether one compares the US to the EU or the US to individual countries.

I think you should leave Norway out of the study. I started from the top and all I seen were people who didn’t understand math and had strange problems understanding how one could compare Norway with this or that. So I scrolled down about a year and they were still talking about Norway. I scrolled to the bottom and the last response was about Norway and how great the unicorn population is and their society is so advanced we can not comprehend, that is us mere mortals. (The same country that is deporting Muslim’s left and right.) So down with Norway and maybe someone will understand your true point. That with liberty there comes a cost and without liberty looks like the cost is no better or worse. And most of all the President of the US is actually a Norwegian. (Believes that life is perfect in Norway)

What I get out of this article is that the countries with the highest level of gun control, Japan, Britain, The Netherlands, Germany etc etc etc etc consistently have the the lowest numbers of gun homicides, Suicides, and mass shootings. I think it would be VERY interesting to see a relative rating of gun control for each country posted in the Charts.

Dear SubmarineVeteran: Your selective set of countries doesn’t make much sense as countries such as countries such as the Netherlands and Germany have virtually identical gun laws to those in Austria, France, Belgium, Serbia, and Slovakia. So those later countries are all places with equally strict gun control but worse records than the US? Why did you selectively pick the countries that you did?

I’m a little late to the party, but nonetheless I’d like to express some doubts about the data presented here. Not that I’m anything remotely close to knowledgeable on statistics, but still, I feel like what I have to say has some merit. And before I begin, let me state that I find most European attitudes towards guns to be overly strict, to the point where they become harmful.

The biggest issue I see is the time frame used. Several of the countries listed have had very few documented shootings throughout their recent history (say, from WWII onwards). I also understand the risks of under-reporting (which are probably smaller in the US), but we are supposed to work with established facts, and account for such risks in other ways.

For instance, there was only one single documented shooting in Norway (Breivik), but the time period and (perhaps) the country’s small population (~5 million, if memory serves) makes “fatalities per million per annum” seem extremely high, whereas Norway is without a doubt an extremely safe place as far as mass/spree shootings are concerned. Another example is the Czech Republic. Unless I’m mistaken, their only mass shooting is the Uherský Brod shooting. What is also very interesting is that, in the case of Breivik, he initially tried to buy illegal weapons, but was unable to, and thus went the legal route. The Czech guy owned his guns legally as well (although I think his permit was at risk of being revoked). These two examples lead me to believe that a more accurate assessment would examine mass public shootings over much greater periods of time, to account for all that time during which the US experienced mass shootings, whereas some of these countries did not.

Something else that I think should be noted is that some of the (extremely small) countries topping the charts (Macedonia, Albania, Serbia, etc) are still recovering from the post-socialist instability that prevailed in the Balkan area. The armed conflicts have left a lot of bitter feelings, as well as very strong nationalist sentiments and tensions among the various nationalities. But most importantly, these conflicts have left a lot of households with (illegal) guns. To add to that, their governments are too weak and inexperienced to be able to enforce any real gun control. Essentially, I am trying to say that there is a noticeable difference between, for instance, an Albanian ultranationalist whose uncle fought with UCK and gave him his AK, and James Holmes, who does not have any outside support (i.e. collective national pride, vendetta-type attitudes stemming from their honor codes, etc) for his actions, and is little more than a deranged man. The first one has the connections to acquire an assault rifle, he has approval from portions of the population (collective support for a cause can mean that there is better infrastructure to support it, even in the face of official resistance), and is unlikely to be stopped by the incompetent police force, whereas the second one has no such connections to speak of, no outside “moral/cultural” support for his madness, and has to deal with more effective police.

This also means that comparisons treating Europe/the EU as a whole (possibly to make a comparison with the US federal system?) may not very accurate, as the various countries enforce their different laws with varying degrees of effectiveness.

Additionally, I would like to put my country’s experience here. I live in an EU country where gun control is absurdly strict. It certainly doesn’t help that the government isn’t too competent, nor does it help that the collapse of the socialist states led to a massive illegal importation of both military-grade weapons, as well as end users for said weapons. As far as I know, we’ve had a total of two mass/spree shootings (a career criminal once did a mag dump with an AK against a cafeteria and fled, but none died, so take this as a 3rd one if you wish): One was sometime in the ’60s, and the other fairly recently, but was a failure (I think the perp only injured 1 or 2 people before killing himself). Now, as far as gun crime is concerned, we basically suck. There was a period when newsstands were being robbed with Kalashnikovs. Mafia-types and their “muscles” may have hidden pistols or SMGs. Far-left terrorists have even stolen and used rockets. And in addition, a lot of people have kept old guns as part of a cultural heritage of sorts.

What’s interesting however, is that despite having lots of career criminals using guns, some old terrorism cases, and occasionally murders of lawful citizens by other seemingly lawful citizens with legal or illegal guns, mass shootings are deafeningly absent. We have witnessed some people pulling out knives and attempting/threatening to go on rampages, but mass shootings just don’t happen. I am saying this in order to respond to the “criminals will get guns anyway” argument, because in my opinion any attempt to equate a (until recently) generally law-abiding citizen (who however wants to be a mass murderer) with a career criminal who knows his way and manners in his subculture of crime would ignore/nullify several key cultural differences. Basically I don’t think it’s as easy for someone to make such a big leap into the unknown world of the black market and come out with a gun as it is for someone who is already in it. It’s not impossible, but it’s not as easy.

I also think it’s somewhat unfair to compare the recent terror wave in the EU, because a)there was a massive influx of migrants, which increased recruitment, as well as population numbers (had sth similar happened in the US, the stats might have been different), b)many of them live in poverty or even in crime, which means that they are, from a social point of view, closer to people selling illegal arms, and c)those who are terrorists usually operate in groups, which means that with their combined resources and expertise, they can get around regulations more easily. This last part in particular is notably different from the profiles of many US shooters, who acted either alone or in pairs, were not closely associated with crime/criminal subcultures, and had no ideological/material support from any collective.

I don’t understand your point. The break down is done at both the individual country, EU, and continent level because that covers all the possible alternatives. Obama’s comments claim over and over again that the US is unique among countries, and you can only get at that if you look at individual countries. However, you break things down you have to adjust for individual populations. The issue of Obama being right or wrong is a simple factual question. Your reasons for why Obama is wrong are besides that point, right? In any case, virtually all of these attacks in Europe involve illegal weapons.

I (and many others) certainly don’t look at these stats as mere grounds for proving or disproving claims made by the POTUS. I wrote this comment in order to, I guess you could say counter, some potential conclusions that one might reach about mass shootings when looking at these statistics. It’s just that I feel something in the methodology must be wrong, because, as far as the general worldwide gun policy debate is concerned, stats like these paint peaceful countries in an extremely negative light by presenting results that are irrational. Most Norwegians probably only knew of mass shootings through news reports prior to 2011, and yet they top the charts. Same for the Czechs. The fact that the US ranks lower than these countries is simply wrong, and can only be a result of the narrow time period chosen, or a flaw in the population adjustments (which I doubt is the case). In my opinion, unless a more complete comparison is done (i.e. one that compares all the incidents from, for instance WW2 and on), then such lists serve no essential purpose.

Concerning my other comments, in the first one I tried to explain why some of the top ranking countries are where they are on the charts, and why they should not be taken as serious examples concerning the effectiveness of gun control. And further down, I attempted to attack arguments that tend to support the notion that terrorists and mentally deranged individuals have the same ability to purchase illegal firearms. In my opinion, this is not the case, and I gave my country’s example to show that, despite guns being used frequently to commit all sorts of crime from robberies to terrorism, mass shootings are our last concern.

Also, something a bit irrelevant, but, I noticed that the 2014 Isla Vista massacre is not listed here. May I ask why it was omitted?

Whether Obama had made his comments or not, breaking down the results by country, EU, and continent seems like reasonable ways to make the comparison just to see if the results are sensitive to the different possibilities. In any case, given the differences in individual country laws and at the EU level, it makes sense to look at both of those cases. There is no problem at looking at individual countries as long as you adjust for differences in population sizes.

I listed other attacks in European countries over earlier years in both the posts that are involved here. One covers the Obama years and the other goes back to 1970, so we show that the results aren’t dependent on long or short periods of time, and given the big differences between the US and some other EU countries, the same would be true for intermediate periods of time. The longer period of time shows that Europe is much worse relative to the US, so again I am not sure what your point is here.

Just so you know, almost all the weapons used in mass public shootings in Europe involve illegally obtained weapons.

As to the Isla Vista massacre, the number killed by a gun was three (he had also stabbed or bludgeoned three other men to death), thus short of the 4 or more killed standard used for these mass public shootings.

[…] When adjusted for population, countries like Finland, Switzerland, Norway and Slovakia actually rank higher in per-capita mass shootings. Even after total gun control, Finland had two school shootings in two […]

[…] have proven ineffective. Chicago alone has had over 2500 shooting victims just this year alone. European gun laws have also proven ineffective compared to the US. As Thomas Sowell points out, “In the middle of the 20th century, you could buy a shotgun in […]

Of course, we all know that that the CPRC and Dr. Lott are funded by the NRA and gun lobby. And of course, Dr. Lott is widely discredited in the academic world, but hey, I spent hours checking your sources and you don´t have to be that smart to realize that this article and Dr. Lott´s assertions are just bogus. The sources are just not there with the exception of one dubious screen shot from a so called Rampage Shooting Index which for some reason links to Harvard´s School of Public Health. And if Dr. Lott´s readers would actually take the time to read through that website they would realize that they make just the opposite argument that the CPRC is making. Amazing to also see how Dr. Lott´s sources are himself, or his talking points on Fox News or maybe Dr. Lott again. So why do you do that? bogus research and false claims with no sources what so ever outside of the CPRC or Dr. Lott´s own papers to back it up. That is just academically weird!

Thanks, Brent. My research has never gotten any funding from the NRA.
Can you be specific about what information that you found that was bogus?
The links to CPRC pages contain many links to other sources. It makes more sense to keep different topics on one page. Otherwise each page would have hundreds of links. Original data sources are provided for any data.

This is now linked to via a report about the shooting in Las Vegas as reasons to not change the gun laws.
ARE YOU KIDDING ME!
This report seems to be someones joke in how statistics can prove what ever you want.http://www.gunviolencearchive.org Shows 273 mass shootings in 2017 which is a few more than the 25 in 8 years these reports are based on. It’s all utter fiction.

How many of your own family would you allow to be shot, not necessarily die, before you would accept the law needs to be changed? For me one is too many.
Put a number on it and then go on record to say your own family means that much to you !

Final point, The second amendment was written in times before the invention of electricity, it is that far out of date.

If you read the link that you are upset with, which you clearly didn’t do, you would see that the discussion is using the FBI’s definition of mass public shootings. The gun violence archive uses news stories, which aren’t really a reliable measure, and unlike the FBI definition includes shootings involve many fewer deaths and includes gang fights. Are gang fights important? Sure. But the FBI separated them out because the causes and solutions for them are much different than the types of school or Las Vegas or Paris types shootings that have riveted people’s attention. Here is our earlier discussion of the archive.

Dear Dr. Lott,
thanks for posting another CPRC “discussion” or publication. Could I first of all suggest, getting rid of all of those meaningless and made up footnotes of sources in your “discussions” that lead to no where and that in no way support your assertions, rather just waste everyone´s time? And in reality if anything, disprove the points you are actually trying to make. Just a thought though because most of the times normal academic “discussions” don´t do that. It is just not honest to the reader. Thanks!

I am sorry, but I have no idea what you are referring to. The links and other information are there for supportive material and the data sources. If you aren’t interested, that is your choice. But we are an academic type group.

Hello Dr. Lott,
Thank you for answering. I really do appreciate your attempt at a “discussion” or to put it in real words “N.R.A. propoganda”. and, we all now that, of course, you receive no money from the N.R.A. ;-D, just like it was with Mary Rosh, so let´s cut the bullshit! And, of course, your article is in the first place, now that you changed it, so incoherent, I would like to know your sources for the tables given in this “discussion” (or put into my own stronger words “fake academia”), which, of course, there are no sources outside of the CPRC or yourself! So we have to be critical and ask you: where did you derive these tables from? you don´t list any sources for them! of course, we will not blindly trust you with these numbers. You have to back them up with something!
Second of all, why would you list countries like: Russia, India, Nigeria, Phillipeans, Azerbaijan, Brazil and Isreal in this article when it has no relavance to the subject on this topic?
Third, you are mixing up definitions of what mass shootings are: in one source you list the FBi´s definition as basically a gunman killing 4 people or more at once, with of course taking out gang related violence, etc… On the other scale you list mass shootings as 15 or more people killed at once. Please get a standard basis for what you want to compare mass shootings with.
Fourth, as a faulty source let´s start with the most obvious one:
-the so called “Rampage Public Shooting index” found at: http://archive.is/f4gbv Interesting is, of course, any half ass computer person can tell that this is from a Russian server, very interesting, don´t you think Dr. Lott? But hey, Russians can also tell the truth and also can contribute to the scientific world, so let´s just stay focused and check their sources which are classified with beautiful stars, now isnt that cute? so, here we go!!!:
* “see compendium”, just a redirect to Harvard´s School of Public Health home site (will get back to this later)
** “”OECD Statistics.” OECD Statistics. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, n.d. Web. 09 Jan. 2013.” or the weblink here: http://stats.oecd.org/ Important to notice is the “n.d.” which means “no data”, and is very telling because I will make your job easy, this source has literally no data to offer on this subject.
*** “Gun Law and Policy. University of Sydney, n.d. Web. 09 Jan. 2013.” website here: http://www.gunpolicy.org/ Isn´t this amazing Dr.Lott! a country that use to be riddled by gun violence just like the U.S. is today. And all of the sudden, this source has the status of “no data”, basically because Australia has no need to inform its public that gun control leads to a better and more happy life. They got rid of all there guns and they don´t have anything to complain about. IT IS OBSOLETE! Here a direct qoute from the website: “This site is no longer supported by donors, and has no staff. Updates will recommence if and when funding is available.” Isn´t it amazing to see a country abandone their need to inform the public about how stupid guns are because everyone in Australia knows it now? It has been abandoned and again there is simply no data there to support the russian´s table as far as mass shootings go!
**** “Police Officers.” Eurostat Data Explorer. Eurostat, n.d. Web. 09 Jan. 2013.” Website here: http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?dataset=crim_plce&lang=en Again, n.d. no data, just a table of how many police officers are present in the E.U. so let´s move on…
***** “”Psychiatrists.” Health at a Glance 2011: OECD Indicators. Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2001. N. pag. Print. [No Web Link]” o.k. here I have to admit, no web site for some reason not given…but hey, I googled it and found it on the within 10 seconds…yay for me! here the web link: https://www.oecd.org/els/health-systems/49105858.pdf again no significant data on this subject.
****** “”Safety.” OECD Better Life Index. N.p., n.d. Web. 09 Jan. 2013.” Web link here: http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/safety/ and, surprise, no data on this subject, let me just remind you, we are talking about mass shootings.
******* “”Suicides.” Health at a Glance 2011: OECD Indicators. Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2001. N. pag. Print.” so again they claim that there is no web site available…should I google it again? nope, because it is the same site that we looked up earlier which has no information what so ever about mass shootings. And they can´t even name a page in this paper to go to see their findings.

-fifth, the article is such a mixture of non-coherent blabbery so that the reader in no possible way has a clue as to what the auther, Dr. Lott, is trying to assert as an idea or thesis.

Conclusion: all sources listed on this website give not a single outside source what so ever for the numbers or information presented in the tables that they are presenting on this website. It is so ridiculous, that I have to just assume that it is probably a joke website for academics (from Russia with love, of course).

Follow up: The Harvard website for the School of Public Health which the imposter website (Rampage Shooting Index) gives as its author is in actuality not the author of the “Rampage Shooting Index” website. If one actually searches the content of the Harvard´s School of Public Health, one will notice a strong divide in Dr. Lott´s, the CPRC´s, and the “Rampage Shooting Index´s” message. I encourage all of you pro-gun members to actually take a look at Harvard´s School of Public Health´s website to see what real academia looks like.

Follow up thesis: Dr. Lott and the CPRC is scrambling to change their argument and this article´s website. They are presenting a noncoherent theory of mixed oppinions that have nothing to do with each other to confuse non-intellectual Americans about the real world wide data from legitamite research institutions and academicaly highly accredited institiutions internationally on the topic of gun violence.

p.s. Dr. Lott, I have to go to sleep now, but will follow up later with an in-depth analysis of your other bogus sources! Cheers and good night!

Hi Dr. Lott,
so my grip with you today is your sloppy work and presentation of data. let´s forget the outside source thing and just take the few sources that you have listed above. Ok, let´s go for it.
In your presented table called: “Mass Public Shootings in Europe and the EU (January through December 2015, EU countries are shown in bold)”, you apparently have a very weak understanding of what countries are in the E.U. So hey, it is not a mathmatical thing or calculation thing rather a geography thing. The countries in this graph that you listed in bold and were not in the European Union in the time frame between 2009-2015 and still today are not members of the E.U. are following: Norway, Switzerland (2x), and Russia. Very odd is that you list Russia once in bold and once not in bold. Extremely professional! And to be honest, I actually tried to calculate several times where the mistake was that you made, to no avail. So I just quite trying to figure out if it was an honest mistake or you are just counting on people not to check your data.
So , I took the liberty of calculating out the real numbers according to your data just because I am a nice guy. All E.U. fatalities listed by you are 224. This means we have a fatality per million rate just in the E.U. of 0.4408. Significantly less than what you stated in the chart. This also means that the injuries per Million rate just in the E.U. is 1,1118, also significantly less than what you stated in the chart.
Of course, I would love to continue my destruction of your uncredible arguments tomorrow. However, I need better a better definition from you as to what you consider as European borders outside of the E.U. What is your definition on this because you do not say anything anywhere on this and the term Europe can be very unspecific. Thanks and good night.

Conclusion: Dr. Lott and the CPRC is incompetent in having enough knowledge to give real conclusions or “discussion” to the public on this subject (See comment above). This is a blatant and irresponsible article that has no basis on reality due to Dr. Lott´s faulty and just plain sloppy or missleading data. Furthermore, the assertion by Dr. Lott that the CPRC is an academic institution is just plain false! It is obvious that Dr. Lott is the “Lone-Gunman” in this case with no help from other academics due to the lack of scientific, critical jugdement, or per-reviews what so ever on these topics. To put it in simple terms for you Dr. Lott, The CPRC is in no way, shape or form an academic institution to be taken seriously!

[…] elites would love to see our pesky Second Amendment consigned to the dustbin of history, suffers more mass shootings on a statistical basis than the U.S. does? Europe’s restrictions don’t allow a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy […]

[…] For example, Europe has more intense gun control restrictions than the U.S., but they also have more mass shootings. Semi-automatic guns are illegal in France, but people have still found a way to get them. Those […]

Hello Dr. Lott,
so my critisism today on your work is probably your favorite: cherry-picking. With all your faulty conclusions and missguiding information, I have to give you credit in this subject. You are truely an expert in this field! And, of course, I realize that you know this, so you don´t have to comment on this, this post is mainly to show your readers how this works.
I will be analysing your chart: “the Frequency of Mass Public Shootings (Comparing European Countries to the US and Canada From January 2009 to December 2015)”.
The first problem that we face with your cherry-picking tactics in this chart is, both the majority of European countries and the U.S. states don´t have mass shootings. But with your cherry-picking methods, you basically compare small states (micro) where the worse things happen with a giant nation (macro) where the worse things happen including where no bad things happen at all. Or to make a comparison, it would be like a cooking competition where one chef gets only bad ingredients and the other contending chef gets the same bad ingredients but also mostly good ingredients to pep it up a bit.
So, I have compiled a chart (using your data) using the same cherry-picking techniques which you have used in the chart listed above. Here goes:
Title: “The Frequency of Mass Shootings (Comparing U.S. States and Territories to the E.U. and Canada From January 2009 to December 2015)”. Frequency in millions per capita.
1-Washington D.C.: 1.491
2-Montana: 0.968
3-Conneticut: 0,556
4-Washington: 0,418
5-Nabraska: 0.345
6-Puerto Rico: 0,287
7-Oregon: 0.248
8-South Carolina: 0.204
9-Colorado: 0.183
10-Minnesota: 0.182
11-Wisconsin: 0.172
12-Tennessee: 0.151
13-Arizona: 0.146
14-California: 0.102
15-New York: 0.101
16-North Carolina: 0.099
17- Canada: 0.056
18-Florida: 0.049
19-Texas: 0.036
20- European Union: 0.031
So from this cherry picked data, we can conclude that gun control is largely working in the E.U. and also, with a few gripes, in Canada! Amazing, isnt it?
Wouldn´t it make sense, to completely seperate micro and macro statistics from each other?
So, I have taken the liberty to do this for Dr. Lott. Let´s compare the macro elements of the entire U.S.A to the entire E.U. (of course, using only Dr. Lott´s data).
Title: “The Frequency of Mass Public Shootings (Comparing the E.U to the U.S.A. and Canada from January 2009 to December 2015)” Frequency per million people from Mass Public Shootings:
-U.S.A.: 0.077
-Canada: 0.056
-E.U.: 0.031
So from this supported data from Dr. Lott we can confidently derive that the frequency of mass shootings in the U.S. in comparison with the E.U. is 2.48 times higher. Or to put it into even simpler terms, for every one mass shooting per capita that happens in the E.U., 2.48 shootings happen in the U.S.A.

Does the US have a bad drug gang problem and is there a lot of violence between and by drug gangs? Yes, but that is quite different than mass public shootings such as those at the concert in Paris that left 130 dead or the one in Las Vegas that killed 58. Both the causes and solutions for these mass public shootings are quite different from gang shootings.

BTW, compared to many countries, it is a bit misleading to say that there is a US murder rate or even for a state as there are huge differences across the US or across any individual state.

Hello Dr. Lott,
my next critisisms of your “academic” work is very present in your last post. You are now obviously deflecting to another subject, which is, of course, very important as well(!!!), without commenting on the actual faulty and misguided information from you that I was addressing. I never mentioned anything about “gang violence” in my explainations of your deceiving tactics or faulty and sloppy work. Rather, I used your data to show how misleading your data presentation is. Nothing more or nothing less.
I also have to mention your complete lack to correct your blatantly faulty numbers and fake conclusions that are still posted on this website. Someone, that is truely interested in spreading the truth about something would, of course, admit to their mistakes immediately or at all. Something you refuse to do.
As far as your second paragraph goes, I just don´t understand the point you are trying to make. It just is not a proper sentence in English and is so off the wall I unfortunately can´t decifer through your massiv grammatical mistakes as to what you are trying to say. I know you have a lot to do disinforming the U.S. public on Fox News and Breitbart and N.R.A. conventions and you must be very tired a lot of the times. And I understand this. We are both native English speakers born and raised in the U.S.A., and I am not perfect gramatically in my posts as well. But please take the effort and time to communicate yourself well so that people can understand you, or just put it off by a day or two. I wont mind. Thank you.

Hello Dr. Lott,
concerning your second paragraph in the above post with the claim that there is no U.S. murder rate “compared to many countries”. And then you list how many COUNTIES in the U.S. that have no murders in them. Are you trying to suggest that there are no counties, or “boroughs” as the Europeans call them, in Europe that have any murders? But, of course, this is a completely different topic that we can discuss later. Unfortunately, you have no evidence on this topic to effectivly compare Europe to the U.S. and just pulled this assumption out of your behind (to put it nicely). And, of course, this just supports my former critic of your work in trying to compare largely different scales in your statistics.

We are only including terror attacks involving mass public shootings. You seem to believe that mass public shootings in the US are somehow different in terms of planning or their goals than attacks in Europe or the rest of the world. The point is to kill people to get media attention. We are using the FBI definition of mass public shootings.

If you want to include deaths from vehicle attacks or bombings, the EU is much higher than the US.

[…] elites would love to see our pesky Second Amendment consigned to the dustbin of history, suffers more mass shootings on a statistical basis than the U.S. does? Europe’s restrictions don’t allow a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy […]

Every single day over 90 people die in car wrecks —–
where is the demand to ban cars?
There has never been a government that banned it’s own ARMED FORCES from “Keeping and Bearing” ARMS.

Find one government in the history of humanity that felt a need to document a “RIGHT” for it’s ARMED FORCES to possess ARMS.
Oppressive Governments are ALWAYS banning the People’S RIGHTS to arms.
The claim that the Founding Fathers wrote the 2nd Amendment to give Our ARMED FORCES a “right” to keep and carry ARMS is S-T-U-P-I-D.
The only reason for the Second Amendment is to clearly spell-out the GOD GIVEN RIGHT of INDIVIDUALS to keep & bear ARMS.
The only reason for the BILL(list) of RIGHTS was to codify INDIVIDUALS’ GOD GIVEN RIGHTS.
Has there ever been a government that was not chock full of it’s “rights” up to and including declaring itself to be the Lord God Almighty?! (Rome, Egypt, Israel,etc)
Does the 1st Amendment mean the GOVERNMENT is allowed to give speeches? Try shutting up any Politician. But THEY would LOVE to shut YOU up, hence the FIRST Amendment.
Anyone who tells you the 2nd Amendment applies to the Army or State Militia, is telling you they think you are STUPID.
There has NEVER been a government that felt it had to codify it’s army’s/soldier’s “RIGHT” to “Keep and BEAR ARMS” because there has NEVER been a government that refused to allow It’s own soldiers to KEEP and BEAR ARMS!
The Second Amendment was given to the People, like all the other rights in the Bill or Rights. This was confirmed by the SCOTUS in the DC vs Heller decision, where they stated that the “People” in the Second Amendment were the same “People” that are mentioned in the First and Fourth Amendment.
The 2nd Amendment clearly guarantees the “right of the PEOPLE to keep and bear arms”, and certainly not “the Militia”.
Why would “the Militia”, a type of army manned by citizen-soldiers as opposed to full-time “regulars”, need a constitutional amendment to guarantee they have the right “to keep and bear arms”?
Is there any specific statement anywhere in the Constitution that the army Congress is empowered to raise has the “right to keep and bear arms”?

Of course not. …………. That is assumed.
“The beauty of the Second Amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it.” — Thomas Jefferson

It is implicit in the nature of all kinds of armies —- be they militia or regulars, volunteer, conscripted, or mercenary — to be armed.
They are all “armed forces”.
They all “bear arms”.
They all carry guns.
That is what they do.
It certainly no more requires an amendment to the Constitution to state that “the Militia” has the RKBA , than a specific statement that the army Congress is empowered to raise may be manned by armed troops.

“The [U.S.] Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals … it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government … it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizen’s protection against the government.” Ayn Rand

[…] With Guards Polish President:’Forcing migrants on nations will mean the end of the EU’ UPDATED: Comparing Death Rates from Mass Public Shootings and Mass Public Violence in the US and Eur… NFL Favorability Crashes In Latest Poll: National Football League has gone from being one of […]

Hello again Dr. Lott,
I have, of course, noticed your changes that you have done with your incredibly again sloppy and half-a** work. You have actually changed the data which you showed earlier in your chart: “Mass public Shootings in Europe and the E.U. (January 2009 through December 2015, E.U. countries shown in bold)”. Many thanks for this correction. You have delited Norway, and Russia as member countries of the E.U. (which you claimed earlier in the chart). However, I am still confused because all of the bold countries (which you claim are in the E.U.) total to a sum of 336 casualties and not 330, which you claim now. I also have to inform you that you still haven´t deleted Switzerland (which is not a member of the E.U. and never was) from your bold printed list. This means, using only your data, that the total of E.U. casualties from mass-shootings would be 228 people and not 230, which you claim. This shows your massive incompetence to use a standard program, such as Microsoft office, open office, Libre-office, or what ever simple computer program in your so-called research! Your tabel is still riddled with simple mathematical mistakes. Even your non-fatality numbers just don´t add up in this chart!
Furthermore, you claim in your text the following incorrect conclusion about mass shootings in the E.U. and U.S.A.: “The average fatality rate for the 28 E.U. countries is 0.114 (per million)… The U.S. rate is 0.089 is (sic) lower than the EU rate…”. This is just plain false!!! The U.S. fatality rate for mass shootings between 2009-2015 is, using only your data, in reality, 0.62 (per capita per million). Or better said, 543% higher than in the E.U.!!! This means per capita, for every one person that is murdered in the E.U. from a mass shooting, 5.43 people are murdered in the U.S. from a mass shooting!!! but hey, would love to hear your input on this!
Best regards and till next time I have to destroy your pathetic “academic research”.

Hello Dr. Lott,
I have started a GoFundMe campaigne to help your research center out because you don´t recieve any funding from the N.R.A. Please feel free to spred the word because the sooner we can get the funds raised the faster and better your research center can work!
Here is the link:https://www.gofundme.com/new-calculator-for-drlott
Best regards!

Hello DC Weekly Daily News,
Hello Comrades! Many greetings to Russia!
thank you for the worthless half sentence that you provided. Still though, this has absolutely no relevance to the faulty and fake numbers from Dr. Lott that I mentioned above.
If you have any concrete numbers please inform me of it before you take your website down in a month or two. благодаря!

Hi Dr. Lott,
Thank you for all the work and research you do. I just have a question with your comparison between all 28 EU countries and the United States.
“The average incident rate for the 28 EU countries is 0.0602 with a 95% confidence Interval of .0257 to .09477. The US rate is 0.078 is higher than the EU rate, but US and the average for EU countries are not statistically different. The average fatality rate for the 28 EU countries is 0.114 with a 95% confidence Interval of -.0244 to .253. The US rate is 0.089 is lower than the EU rate, but they are again not statistically significantly different.”
I’m assuming you didn’t do this, but did you consider weighting the 28 EU countries by their population size when you were calculating the confidence interval? It seems problematic to give England the same weight as Norway. I was wondering if weighting the countries by population changes the confidence interval.
Thanks again.

Charles Petzold and Timothy Renner question the validity of ranking countries in the way you did it. They say that even if you very strongly bias your initial estimate of a mass shooting’s chances of coming from the US towards “it’s not worse than anywhere else” you still get a really small chance of that actually being the case. The evidence against it is staggering.

Even if one accepts their concerns about comparing the US to individual European countries, which I don’t, I am not exactly sure how these sites are relevant as We just aren’t comparing the US to individual countries in Europe but also the US to Europe as well as individual states to equal size countries in Europe.

The FBI data that you link to, which you say you’re using the same methodology as, shows 160 active shooter situations between 2003-2013. Your own spreadsheet only shows 41 during the same years.

I’m not even sure which data you’re using, since you didn’t put a link to it in the article, but assuming you’re using your own spreadsheet below, you’re only reporting 1/4 of the shootings.

Once I had your numbers, then I had trouble making any sense of them. You’re calculating the Annual Death Rate per million between 2009-2015 at .089. That means 00.089%, correct? As in 890 per million, per year? So with our population of ~315 million that’s 280,350 deaths per year for 7 years for a grand total of 1,962,450, right? Well, your spreadsheet only shows 204 deaths.

I’d love to get an explanation about what I’m doing wrong as neither number makes any sense.

In addition to all of this, nowhere do I see the data you used to calculate the rates of other countries.

Dear Paul: There is a big difference between Mass Public Shootings and active shootings. While both exclude shootings involved in gang fights and other crimes such as robbery and also both focus on shootings in public places, active shooting cases involve instances where no one has been killed or wounded by a gunshot. Indeed, active shooting cases involve instances where only one shot was fired and no one was wounded or killed. By contrast, the traditional FBI definition of Mass Public Shootings involved cases where 4 or more people were killed. There is no one that collects info on one shot being fired in public in Europe that I know of.

I was trying to refer to Adam Lankford’s study on public shootings. He does not include rates based on number of deaths. I forgot that you also included frequency of mass shootings, sorry about that. Anyways, Lankford suggests that 31 percent of the gunman in mass shootings worldwide were American. So, I guess my question is why would someone, like Lankford, want to analyze mass shooting data based on the nationality of the shooters? Could calculating statistics based on the nationality of mass shooters differ from the death rates from mass shootings? I realize that Lankford has not yet given his dataset

He would have to give his dataset before I’d listen to what he’s saying.

31% of mass shooting gunmen in the world being American? It would be a pretty extraordinary claim requiring solid evidence to even say that 31% of the mass shooting gunmen in North America are American (of the U.S. variety, I mean), and that’s a demographic that American’s make up more than half the population of.

There are many places in this world where what we make national news out of as a mass shooting would hardly newsworthy in those places. A couple religious fundamentalists showing up and shooting up a school? In places in Africa and the Middle East that wouldn’t even be worth showing on news it’s so common. So if he’s gonna make such comparisons he’s gonna need an extraordinary dataset the likes of which I’m pretty sure doesn’t even exist. I’d bet that’s a good reason why Mr. Lott stuck to US vs. Europe in his comparisons.

If this ridiculously small sample space of 7 years was taken from 2012 to 2018 then Norway wouldn’t even make the list. This makes a mockery of your statistics. if you can’t provide a sample space of 20 years then you shouldn’t have done this study but we all know how pro gun biased you are

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A biased interpretation and misleading way of measuring mass shootings. To compare the US, based on a conveniently chosen formula, to small countries with 1 or 2 mass shootings over a long time span is ridiculous. Per capita comparisons become meaningless when numbers become that small eg 1 or 2 shootings or populations of 5 million, they are statistically insignificant. Mr. Lankford is not the only one who’s at question here!

[…] First, the United States is NOT the only developed country in the world where regular mass shootings occur. In fact a study shows that the United States came in 12th when compared to European counties based on the frequency of mass public shootings per million people from 2009-2015. Just because such European mass shootings are not covered in the American press doesn’t mean they didn’t happen. The study can be found here: https://www.crimeresearch.org/2015/06/comparing-death-ratesfrom-mass-public-shootings-in-the-usand-europe/ […]